Structure and performance analysis of fusion positioning system with a single 5G station and a single GNSS satellite

ABSTRACTNaGlobal vigation Satellite System (GNSS) positioning technology is widely used for its high precision, global, and all-weather service. However, in complex environments such as urban canyons, GNSS performance is often degraded due to signal occlusion and even fails to achieve positioning due to the insufficient visible satellites. Because of the characteristics of large bandwidth, low latency, and high Base Station (BS) density, the fifth-Generation mobile communication (5G) technology has gradually become a trend for positioning in cities while offering traditional communication service. To supply the communication demands of the User Equipment (UE), only one BS is usually considered to establish a connection with the UE during the BS construction. However, the positioning accuracy with a single BS in urban canyons will be significantly reduced. To further improve the positioning accuracy in such extreme scenarios, this paper proposes a simplified 5G/GNSS fusion positioning system architecture using observations from only a 5G BS and a GNSS satellite. In this system, the GNSS receiver is mounted on the 5G BS, and the measurements provided by the receiver are used to form the differential code and complete the position estimation. The positioning mathematical models of the system based on the original code and differential code are derived. Then, the impacts of the measurements noise and the time synchronization error on the positioning accuracy are analyzed theoretically. Finally, the positioning performance is investigated by a set of simulation experiments. Numerical results show that under the existing 5G measurement noise and 2 m’s code measurement noise, the improvement of the differential code based fusion positioning compared with the 5G-only positioning is more than 32%, which is also about 6% higher than the original code based fusion positioning. Besides, this improvement is not affected by the time synchronization error between the BS and the GNSS satellite.