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Uplink Joint Positioning and Synchronization in Cell-Free Deployments with Radio Stripes

Published
Sat, Apr 01, 2023
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Radio stripes (RSs) is an emerging technology in beyond 5G and 6G wireless networks to support the deployment of cell-free architectures. This joint work investigates the potential use of RSs to enable joint positioning and synchronization in the uplink channel at sub-6 GHz bands. The considered scenario consists of a single-antenna user equipment (UE) that communicates with a network of multiple-antenna RSs distributed over a wide area. The UE is assumed to be unsynchronized to the RSs network, while individual RSs are time- and phase-synchronized. We formulate the problem of joint estimation of position, clock offset, and phase offset of the UE and derive the corresponding maximum-likelihood (ML) estimator, both with and without exploiting carrier phase information. Our team at the SPSC Lab contributed a Fisher information analysis to gain fundamental insights into the achievable performance and to inspect the theoretical lower bounds numerically. Simulation results demonstrate that a promising positioning and synchronization performance can be obtained in cell-free architectures supported by RSs, revealing at the same time the benefits of carrier phase exploitation through phase-synchronized RSs.

This work is accepted for presentation at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Communications. If you are interested have a look at the arXiv preprint.

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