Millimeter Wave Positioning and Location-Aware Communications for 5G-Empowered Industrial IoT

Abstract

With the fast technological development in the future generation wireless systems, known as the fifth generation of cellular networks (5G) and beyond, radio positioning steadily serves as one of the key enablers to the industrial Internet of things (IoT), where the location information of all the user equipment (UE), such as smart phones, wearables, and the ground/aerial robots can be obtained via millimeterwave (mmWave) connectivity and measurements. The obtained knowledge of the location via positioning can thereafter be exploited for enhanced communications and location-based services, further improving, e.g., the situational awareness and spectral efficiency for the industrial IoT use cases. Aiming at developing and exploiting the radio positioning technologies, the first objective is to achieve the location awareness via positioning in the industrial IoT systems. Particularly, several 3D positioning and tracking algorithms are developed, their performance is evaluated with the potential challenges existed in the context of the industrial environment. The second objective is to exploit the location awareness for enhanced communications. By utilizing the obtained location awareness, the attainable performance gain in terms of communications is investigated. In particular, a network-centric positioning-aided beamforming (PA-BF) strategy and a device-centric location-aware handover (LHO) scheme are respectively presented and assessed.

In essence, this thesis provides a conceptual and technical journey from positioning to location-aware communications. First of all, by targeting the industrial IoT systems where the anchors’ locations are not perfectly known, several approaches, such as weighted centroid geometric (WCG) and a joint positioning and tracking framework based on the extended Kalman filter (EKF) are proposed to achieve accurate and reliable 3D positioning. Second of all, in terms of location-aware communications, a network-centric positioning-aid communication framework (positioning + BF) is proposed and employed to take advantage of the achieved location awareness within the networks. It is demonstrated that the PA-BF strategy in general ix outperforms the standardized BF strategy with respect to the inital access latency and spectral efficiency, especially for UE with velocity higher than normal human walking speed (≈ 0.6m/s). Third of all, by utilizing a multi-radio access technology (RAT) robotic platform, the feasibility of the LHO is explored and investigated in a multi-radio environment. With WiFi and mmWave RAT (WiGig) connectivities as well as the available environmental awareness, our experimental results show that the applied LHO is capable of maintaining an enhanced link robustness while enjoying an augmented throughput compared with channel state information (CSI)-based handover.

In conclusion, the proposed algorithms and framework are built based on mathematical formulation, simulation, and experiments, demonstrating the improvement and/or the trade-off among the performance metrics in terms of both positioning and communications, such as positioning accuracy in both 2D and vertical direction, initial access latency, and spectral efficiency. Therefore, it is expected that the corresponding formulations and framework presented in this thesis could lay the foundation for the integration of communications and positioning solutions, further advancing the proposed framework and concepts beyond industrial IoT, towards an intelligent and universal wireless ecosystem with versatile functions and capabilities.