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5G positioning will be part of our lifes. Ever wondered how your food delivery app seems to know your location better than you do? Maybe you remember this Last Week Tonight video, where John Oliver was talking about the difference between the google location based services and the E911 (clicking on the image will open embedded player).
That’s surely a funny video. However, the underlying topic is quite serious. Accurate positioning is a key element to some of the near future technological advances (for example, autonomous driving).
With location based services becoming part of our everyday life, everyone should get familiar with them. We as users need to be in control of who and where has access to our location. No one doubts that the emergency responders knowing your location when you dial 911 is a good thing – they may be able to help you faster. On the other hand, does the online game you installed last week really need to know your location at all times?
This website will help understand what positioning is and how it is integrated into 5G, LTE and the legacy cellular networks.
5G Positioning
Location Based Services (LBS) and positioning are one of the most fundamental features of 5G New Radio.
Positioning Applications
Cellular network positioning was traditionally driven by the regulatory positioning requirements from the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) of the US and the E112 regulation in the European Union. However, starting with LTE and more prominently in 5G, a lot of commercial applications started to demand Location Based Services.
Location Based Services
Smartphone apps offer services based in location, such as location-based PUSH advertisement, augmented reality, ride sharing, etc.
5G has raised the bar for LBS, including safety critical applications that require high reliabilitay, availability and integrity, while keeping the latency low. Autonomous Driving, eHealth, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), factory automation and the Industry 2.0 or traffic monitoring and control are only a few of these new positioning applications.
Emergency calling
The FCC of the U.S. and the European Commission in the EU have positioning requirements for E911 and E112 calls.
However, commercial applications also benefit from accurate positioning. This is referred to as Location Based Services (LBS). Typical uses of LBS include location-based PUSH advertisement, maps and navigation apps, delivery services, etc.
Autonomous driving
Accurate positioning is a critical safety feature to enable autonomous driving and collision avoidance mechanisms.
You can read about both commercial and regulatory applications in our Applications page.
Positioning Technologies
In order to meet the industry needs, 5G offers a range of positioning technologies, from the widely-known GPS and other GNSS, to cellular-network based methods, like DL-TDOA. You will find more information about in our Positioning Technologies page.
About Us
At 5Gpositioning.com, we are a team of people deeply involved in cellular network location based services. We have many years of experience working in the field and we have been part of the 5G New Radio standardization in 3GPP. Therefore, we would like to use our knowledge to help other people in understanding how cellular network positioning works. We have written a book about it, which will be published by Artech House in August 2020. This website will expand the content of the book with worked our examples, videos and presentations.
Our Book
Get our book if you want to know everything about positioning in cellular networks.
You can pre-order it now from Artech House
Tutorials
Visit the Tutorials page to see our available material. We will be adding new material regularly, so make sure to stay in touch! You can Contact us by using our contact form if you would like to give us feedback or you would like some specific tutorial. While we cannot guarantee that we will grant every request, we will try to do our best.