Pedestrian Positioning in Urban Environments with 5G Technology

Pedestrian safety is emerging as a priority in the development of smart mobility solutions relying on vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. While past research leveraged passive sensing in V2X systems to track pedestrians, this study emphasizes active vulnerable road user (VRU) positioning using the existing fifth generation (5G) cellular networks. Through simulations in urban settings using ray tracing to examine multipath propagation and non-visibility conditions, the analysis evaluates the achievable accuracy of the currently deployed 5G network in the sub-6 GHz frequency band with 3GPP standard-compliant positioning signals. Results show that the current configuration of base stations limits the positioning accuracy by a few meters error, thus requesting network deployment and physical-layer en-hancements to fulfill safety-critical application requirements.