By Ron Chen, Senior Correspondent ASEAN Region 

At its Global Analyst Summit (HAS) 2022, Huawei launched its commercial 5G indoor positioning solution.

This is the first time the industry has provided a toB-focused 5G positioning solution. The positioning this solution offers is accurate to 1–3 m@90 per cent, making beacon-free positioning easier even in complex indoor use cases, while supporting open standard interfacing to industry applications. This allows enterprises to implement reliable, secure, and differentiated E2E 5G positioning in their campuses, injecting new impetus in advancing industry digitalization.

5G positioning was introduced in 3GPP Release 16, with a designed accuracy of 3 m@80 per cent indoors. President of Huawei’s DIS Product Line, Marvin Chen, said that Huawei has verified 5G indoor positioning in many industries, like manufacturing, warehousing, and transportation. The verification showed that the positioning accuracy reached 1–3 m@90 per cent in LOS indoors. Exceeding the 3GPP requirements, such a high level of positioning accuracy and reliability allows most business applications to adequately locate personnel, equipment, and materials. “3GPP is now working to increase the accuracy to within 1 m to fulfill the requirements on higher-accuracy positioning in various industries,” added Chen.

Huawei’s 5G indoor positioning is split between LampSite Enterprise Edition (EE) and on-premises location service (LCS) modules. It supports open standard interfacing to third-party platforms and applications that need location information. It uses uplink time difference of arrival (UTDOA) and field strength fingerprint-based technologies to ensure indoor positioning can be implemented in both light-of-sight (LOS) and non-light-of-sight (NLOS) environments.

More importantly, Huawei has incorporated two new features into its 5G indoor positioning solution: radio simultaneous localization and mapping (Radio SLAM) and AI-based big data clustering iteration algorithm. By automating fingerprint library generation and UTDOA-needed beacon-free correction of signal arrival time differences, the two features add extra convenience to quickly complete collection fingerprints and beacon placement.

Vice President of Huawei Cloud Core Network Product Line, Huke Hu shared Huawei’s strength in 5G positioning. “With abundant accumulation and experience, our solution meets the latest needs for scenario adaptability, platform openness, and service reliability of enterprises. Due to flexible scenario adaptation, positioning can be implemented locally in various campuses to support differentiated service requirements. With open standard interfacing, the positioning platforms in different industries can flexibly use our positioning capabilities. This will be the key to the high availability of 5G indoor positioning.”

Combining multiple services in both IT and OT domains into one 5G network has proven uniquely valuable in transforming industries with digital approaches. So far, this practice has been executed on a large scale in many countries. Positioning and communicating over a single network will save investment and simplify O&M. With E2E 5G positioning commercially available and its ecosystem maturing, this will enable more capabilities and more applications for 5G to serve vertical industries.