Joint Positioning and Tracking via NR Sidelink in 5G-Empowered Industrial IoT

The fifth generation (5G) mobile networks with enhanced connectivity and positioning capabilities play an increasingly important role in the development of autonomous and other advanced industrial systems. In this article, we address the prospects of 5G New Radio (NR) sidelink based ad-hoc networks and their applicability for increasing the situational awareness, in terms of continuous tracking of moving connected machines and vehicles, in industrial systems. For increased system flexibility and fast deployments, we assume that the locations of the so-called anchor nodes are unknown, and describe an extended Kalman filter-based joint positioning and tracking framework in which the locations of both the anchor nodes and the target nodes can be estimated simultaneously. We assess and demonstrate the achievable 3D positioning and tracking performance in the context of a realistic industrial warehouse facility, through extensive ray-tracing based evaluations at the 26 GHz NR band. Our findings show that when both angle-based and time-based measurements are utilized, reaching sub-1 meter accuracy is realistic and that the system is also relatively robust against different node geometries. Finally, several research challenges towards achieving robust, high-performance and cost-efficient positioning solutions are outlined and discussed, identifying various potential directions for future work.