CNS Core: Small: Seamless Coexistence of Positioning and Communication in 5G and Beyond Wireless Systems

下一代5G及以上无线系统正在迅速发展，以支持使用其通信基础设施作为本地功能进行定位。尽管依赖于密集部署的基础设施（用于精确定位），但这种基于基础设施的定位方法的开销可能会导致通信性能的显著下降，需要及时注意。提出的研究探索了一种完全不同的通信感知协同定位范式，即以智能，通信感知和协作（对等）的方式将定位负担卸载给客户端设备，从而降低开销并提高空间重用以保持通信性能，同时不影响定位精度。这项提议的研究将为未来的无线网络铺平道路，通过定位和通信的无缝共存，无线网络可以同时作为传感平台。它可以以多种方式影响社会，从使消费者受益的新型5G应用（例如沉浸式应用）和企业，到更广泛地使基础设施轻/免费定位成为挑战公共安全和远程编排环境的核心。它旨在通过展示协作定位的潜力并倡导其在标准规范中的适应，为即将到来和未来的IEEE和3GPP标准提供信息。它还将通过展示其结果来影响积极致力于定位的行业。本研究旨在通过解决以下三个关键挑战，为实现这一愿景迈出重要的一步：(i)描述通信和定位性能之间的权衡，并利用协同定位范式设计一个无缝、高效的共存框架；（ii）通过可扩展的分布式介质接入机制，实现异步（WiFi）和同步（蜂窝：LTE和新无线电，NR）接入系统在实践中共存；以及（iii）在我们转向更具挑战性的高频毫米波系统时，启用和利用定位超越共存并优化通信性能，因为这些系统承受着测量开销的负担。通过设计一个分析健全的共存框架以及集成的（WiFi + LTE/NR） 5G测试平台网络部署，我们将提出一套创新的算法和协议，使我们不仅能够在通信和定位性能方面取得有效的平衡，而且能够提高未来高频无线系统的通信性能。这样的框架将具有比定位更广泛的影响，并将适用于我们未来6G网络中备受期待的“联合通信和传感”范式下的其他几个传感问题。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Next generation 5G and beyond wireless systems are rapidly evolving to support positioning as a native feature using their communication infrastructure. Notwithstanding the dependence on a densely deployed infrastructure (for accurate positioning), the overhead of such an infrastructure- based positioning approach can bring significant degradation to communication performance, and warrants timely attention. The proposed research explores a fundamentally different paradigm of communication-aware collaborative positioning, whereby the burden of positioning is offloaded to client devices in an intelligent, communication-aware and collaborative (peer-peer) manner that reduces overhead and improves spatial reuse to preserve communication performance, without compromising on positioning accuracy. The proposed research will pave the way for future wireless networks that double up as sensing platforms through a seamless coexistence of positioning and communication. It can impact society in more ways than one, ranging from enabling novel 5G applications that benefit consumers (e.g. immersive applications) and enterprises to more broadly enabling infrastructure-light/free positioning that is central to challenging public-safety and remote orchestration environments. It aims to inform upcoming and future IEEE and 3GPP standards by demonstrating the potential of collaborative positioning and advocating for its accommodation in the standard specifications. It will also impact the industry that is actively working on positioning through demonstration of its results.The proposed research aims to take an important step towards this vision by addressing three key challenges: (i) characterizing the tradeoff between communication and positioning performance, and leveraging the paradigm of collaborative positioning to design a seamless and efficient coexistence framework; (ii) realizing coexistence in practice for both asynchronous (WiFi) and synchronous (cellular: LTE and new radio, NR) access systems through scalable, distributed medium access mechanisms; and (iii) enabling and leveraging positioning to go beyond coexistence and optimize communication performance as we move to more challenging high frequency millimeter-Wave systems that are burdened by measurement overhead. Through the design of an analytically-sound coexistence framework along with an integrated (WiFi + LTE/NR) 5G testbed network deployment, we will propose a suite of innovative algorithms and protocols that allow us to not only strike an efficient balance in both communication and positioning performance, but also enhance communication performance in future high frequency wireless systems. Such a framework will have broader implications beyond positioning and will apply to several other sensing problems under the much-anticipated paradigm of “joint communication and sensing” in our future 6G networks.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.