High-Precision 3D Location and Orientation Tracking Using Multi-Sensor Cellular Carrier Phase Measurements

Abstract

Recent 5G-Advanced cellular specifications introduce several positioning enhancements, including carrier phase measurements that enable high-precision 3D localization at the accuracy scale of used radio frequency (RF) wavelength. Besides localization, in numerous use cases from extended reality (XR) headsets to industrial automation and heavy machines, accurate knowledge of the device 3D orientation is of paramount importance together with low latency operation. In this paper, utilizing multisensor carrier phase measurements, we address high-precision joint tracking of device 3D location and orientation, where the full device state can be directly estimated at the network side, thus enabling very low latency and response times for possible device-related network actions. The proposed tracking approach builds on extended Kalman filter framework, and is supplemented with a particle filter solution which handles the challenging integer ambiguity problem and maintains synchronization between the network and device under clock drifting. Furthermore, multifrequency carrier phase measurements through carrier-aggregation are addressed to further improve the performance. Based on numerical evaluations, we show that the proposed 3D location and orientation tracking achieves sub-centimeter and sub-degree accuracy for position and orientation estimation, respectively, while also enabling sub-nanosecond network synchronization.