Positioning Technology Trends and Solutions Toward 6G

In the 4G era, cellular positioning was used for emergency services and services associated to lawful interception. In 5G, commercial use cases have gained momentum and use cases like factory automation, transportation, and logistics are included in 5G besides the regulatory use cases. Toward 6G, it is anticipated that positioning and location services will be fundamental part of the system demanded by most commercial applications, such as AR/VR/XR, gaming, sensing, low-cost tracking and new industrial applications with extremely high accuracy. As a result, positioning accuracy and latency requirements are anticipated to tighten further from 5G. Thus, positioning and location services needs to be designed as an integral part of 5G evolution to address these requirements in a scalable and efficient manner both for devices and networks. This paper discusses the technical trends and enablers to realize this vision towards 6G, such as latency and accuracy enhancements, and low-cost positioning.