Coexistence of 5G Sidelink Communication and 5G Sidelink Positioning

New Radio (NR) sidelink has been defined in 3GPP Rel-16 as a new 5G interface for direct device-to-device communication. In the beginning, NR sidelink was designed in Rel-16 for vehicular and public safety communications. In the upcoming 3GPP Rel-18, NR sidelink will be enhanced with sidelink positioning to exploit new location-based services and additional use-cases. However, as NR sidelink positioning is raising different requirements on the configuration of the radio resources needed for the transmission of sidelink positioning reference signals (SL-PRS), it may conflict with the legacy resource allocations for NR sidelink communications. The wide-band SL-PRS requires the maximum number of physical resource blocks, and hence it may potentially conflict with NR sidelink transmissions performed in the same resource pool or sidelink carrier. In this contribution, a proposal on how to resolve the conflict between NR sidelink communication and NR sidelink positioning is presented. A novel scheme for selectively skipping the preemption applied to NR sidelink transmissions, which otherwise would prioritize wideband SL-PRS transmissions, in order to allow multiplexing of SL-PRS and NR sidelink tranmsissions is outlined in this paper. The solution effectively shows that NR sidelink positioning can coexist with NR sidelink communication in the same sidelink carrier.