Uplink Joint Positioning and Synchronization in Cell-Free Deployments with Radio Stripes
Alessio Fascista, Benjamin J. B. Deutschmann, Musa Furkan Keskin, Thomas Wilding, Angelo Coluccia, Klaus Witrisal, Erik Leitinger, Gonzalo Seco-Granados, Henk Wymeersch
Radio stripes (RSs) is an emerging technology in beyond 5G and 6G wireless networks to support the deployment of cell-free architectures. In this paper, we investigate 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. To gain fundamental insights into the achievable performance, we also conduct a Fisher information analysis and inspect the theoretical lower bounds numerically. Simulation results demonstrate that 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.
Uplink Positioning for PASS in Multipath Environments
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学电子信息工程学院）；School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学计算与通信学院）；Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong（香港大学电子电气工程系）
Cell-Free (CF) Massive MIMO (mMIMO) is a technology which can potentially augment not only the deployment of 5G, but also the deployment of beyond 5G (B5G) wireless networks. However, the cost for rolling out such systems may be significant. Radio stripes form a promising solution which offers the potential of scalability at a reduced price. This paper investigates the uplink scenario of a CF mMIMO system, implemented with a limited-capacity radio stripe which integrates a novel arrangement of access points (APs), fully exploiting macro-diversity benefits. We also analyze a heuristic Compare-a…
Cell-free Massive MIMO (mMIMO) is envisaged to be a next-generation technology beyond 5G with its high spectral efficiency and superior spatial diversity as compared to that of conventional MIMO technology. The main principle is that many distributed access points (APs) cooperate to simultaneously serve all the users within the network without creating cell boundaries. This paper considers the uplink of a cell-free mMIMO system utilizing the radio stripe network architecture. We propose a novel sequential processing algorithm with normalized linear minimum mean square error (N-LMMSE) combining…
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In a recent work, we studied a novel precoding design for cell-free networks called team minimum mean-square error (TMMSE) precoding, which rigorously generalizes centralized MMSE precoding to distributed operations based on transmitter-specific channel state information (CSI). Despite its flexibility in handling different cooperation regimes at the CSI sharing level, TMMSE precoding assumes network-wide sharing of the data bearing signals, and hence it is inherently not scalable. In this work, inspired by recent advances on scalable cell-free architectures based on user-centric network cluste…
