Continuous Device Positioning and Synchronization in 5G Dense Networks with Skewed Clocks

Fifth generation (5G) radio networks are expected to provide remarkable improvements in the user experience due to faster data rates and lower latencies, for example. These kind of enhancements are made possible by several technical advances when compared to the existing networks. In particular, densification of network, device-centric network topology and exploitation of smart antennas, among others, will play key roles in network developments. In addition to obvious benefits in solely communications type of services, the aforementioned technological advances allow for completely new kind of applications. In this paper, we focus on user equipment (UE) positioning, and additionally show how also successful network synchronization can be done in 5G networks in a highly sophisticated, but low-complex network-centric solution. We will extend the analysis available in the existing literature to fully unsynchronized networks where the UEs as well as the network remote radio heads (RRHs) have clock offsets and skews with respect to a given reference clock. Our numerical performance analysis, based on realistic network and propagation models, show that the proposed method can provide sub-meter range positioning accuracy and highly accurate synchronization of the network elements.