No Arabic abstract
The capability to achieve high-precision positioning accuracy has been considered as one of the most critical requirements for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) services in the fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks. The non-line-of-sight (NLOS) connectivity, coverage, reliability requirements, the minimum number of available anchors, and bandwidth limitations are among the main challenges to achieve high accuracy in V2X services. This work provides an overview of the potential solutions to provide the new radio (NR) V2X users (UEs) with high positioning accuracy in the future 3GPP releases. In particular, we propose a novel selective positioning solution to dynamically switch between different positioning technologies to improve the overall positioning accuracy in NR V2X services, taking into account the locations of V2X UEs and the accuracy of the collected measurements. Furthermore, we use high-fidelity system-level simulations to evaluate the performance gains of fusing the positioning measurements from different technologies in NR V2X services. Our numerical results show that the proposed hybridized schemes achieve a positioning error $boldsymbol{leq}$ 3 m with $boldsymbol{approx}$ 76% availability compared to $boldsymbol{approx}$ 55% availability when traditional positioning methods are used. The numerical results also reveal a potential gain of $boldsymbol{approx}$ 56% after leveraging the road-side units (RSUs) to improve the tail of the UEs positioning error distribution, i.e., worst-case scenarios, in NR V2X services.
The ever-increasing demand for intelligent, automated, and connected mobility solutions pushes for the development of an innovative sixth Generation (6G) of cellular networks. A radical transformation on the physical layer of vehicular communications is planned, with a paradigm shift towards beam-based millimeter Waves or sub-Terahertz communications, which require precise beam pointing for guaranteeing the communication link, especially in high mobility. A key design aspect is a fast and proactive Initial Access (IA) algorithm to select the optimal beam to be used. In this work, we investigate alternative IA techniques to fasten the current fifth-generation (5G) standard, targeting an efficient 6G design. First, we discuss cooperative position-based schemes that rely on the position information. Then, motivated by the intuition of a non-uniform distribution of the communication directions due to road topology constraints, we design two Probabilistic Codebook (PCB) techniques of prioritized beams. In the first one, the PCBs are built leveraging past collected traffic information, while in the second one, we use the Hough Transform over the digital map to extract dominant road directions. We also show that the information coming from the angular probability distribution allows designing non-uniform codebook quantization, reducing the degradation of the performances compared to uniform one. Numerical simulation on realistic scenarios shows that PCBs-based beam selection outperforms the 5G standard in terms of the number of IA trials, with a performance comparable to position-based methods, without requiring the signaling of sensitive information.
The fifth generation (5G) mobile networks with enhanced connectivity and positioning capabilities play an increasingly important role in the development of automated vehicle-to-everything (V2X) and other advanced industrial Internet of Things (IoT) systems. In this article, we address the prospects of 5G New Radio (NR) sidelink based V2X 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.
In vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications, reliability is one of the most important performance metrics in safety-critical applications such as advanced driving, remote driving, and vehicle platooning. In this paper, the link reliability of unicast concurrent transmission in mode 1 (centralized mode) of 5G New Radio based V2X (NR-V2X) is analyzed. The closed-form expression of link reliability for concurrent unicast transmission is firstly derived for a highway scenario under a given interference distance distribution. On this basis, according to the macroscopic configuration of the system, a method to control the number of concurrent transmission nodes is proposed, including the communication range, message packet size, and the number of lanes, etc. The results indicate that the proposed method can maximize the system load on the premise of satisfying the link reliability requirements.
In this paper, we introduce a direction of arrival (DoA) estimation method based on a technique named phase spectrometry (PS) that is mainly suitable for mm-Wave and Tera-hertz applications as an alternative for DoA estimation using antenna arrays. PS is a conventional technique in optics to measure phase difference between two waves at different frequencies of the spectrum. Here we adapt PS for the same purpose in the radio frequency band. We show that we can emulate a large array exploiting only two antennas. To this end, we measure phase difference between the two antennas for different frequencies using PS. Consequently, we demonstrate that we can radically reduce the complexity of the receiver required for DoA estimation employing PS. We consider two different schemes for implementation of PS: via a long wave-guide and frequency code-book. We show that using a frequency code-book, higher processing gain can be achieved. Moreover, we introduce three PS architectures: for device to device DoA estimation, for base-station in uplink scenario and an ultra-fast DoA estimation technique mainly for radar and aerial and satellite communications. Simulation and analytical results show that, PS is capable of detecting and discriminating between multiple incoming signals with different DoAs. Moreover, our results also show that, the angular resolution of PS depends on the distance between the two antennas and the band-width of the frequency code-book. Finally, the performance of PS is compared with a uniform linear array (ULA) and it is shown that PS can perform the same, with a much less complex receiver, and without the prerequisite of spatial search for DoA estimation.
In this paper, we aim at interference mitigation in 5G millimeter-Wave (mm-Wave) communications by employing beamforming and Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) techniques with the aim of improving networks aggregate rate. Despite the potential capacity gains of mm-Wave and NOMA, many technical challenges might hinder that performance gain. In particular, the performance of Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) diminishes rapidly as the number of users increases per beam, which leads to higher intra-beam interference. Furthermore, intersection regions between adjacent cells give rise to inter-beam inter-cell interference. To mitigate both interference levels, optimal selection of the number of beams in addition to best allocation of users to those beams is essential. In this paper, we address the problem of joint user-cell association and selection of number of beams for the purpose of maximizing the aggregate network capacity. We propose three machine learning-based algorithms; transfer Q-learning (TQL), Q-learning, and Best SINR association with Density-based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (BSDC) algorithms and compare their performance under different scenarios. Under mobility, TQL and Q-learning demonstrate 12% rate improvement over BSDC at the highest offered traffic load. For stationary scenarios, Q-learning and BSDC outperform TQL, however TQL achieves about 29% convergence speedup compared to Q-learning.