Three-dimensional Positioning in 3GPP Wireless Networks with Small Cells with Barometric Pressure Sensor

Abstract

The US federal communications commission announced new location accuracy requirements for emergency calls. To examine these requirements, we first establish a 3GPP system-level simulator and calibrate its performance for radio access technology-dependent techniques. After considering the 3D channel model, we test and conclude that existing technologies fail to satisfy the indoor vertical accuracy requirement. Therefore, we propose a two-step least-square estimator that adopts a barometric pressure sensor (BPS) to measure the altitude above sea level. The use of BPS improves accuracy for both vertical and horizontal aspects. The positioning performance of both outdoor and indoor user equipment (UE) is simulated, and the results demonstrate that 67% of UE can be localized within 18-m horizontal and 3-m vertical accuracy with 10 small cells. The improved vertical accuracy obtained by the proposed method can be beneficial to UAV communication.