Positioning, Navigation, and Timing on the Air

The widespread adoption of Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) services in many applications across modern society, has given rise to the development of various alternative PNT systems, aiming at addressing the Global Positioning System (GPS) vulnerabilities. In this paper, we introduce a collaborative-based PNT solution by jointly exploiting the use of UAV-assisted wireless networks and the collaboration among the targets and the collaborator nodes in the network, who have unknown and a rough estimate of their position and timing, respectively. The minimization problem of the overall system's and each collaborator node's and target's position and timing estimation error is formulated and solved based on the principles of potential games. The existence of a Nash Equilibrium (NE) of the corresponding game is proven, while two different approaches to obtain the game's NE are studied and their tradeoffs are evaluated. The first one follows a game-theoretic approach and the second one is based on the principles of reinforcement learning. A detailed numerical evaluation is performed, via modeling and simulation, in order to demonstrate the benefits and tradeoffs of the proposed PNT solution.