A New Paradigm of Communication-Aware Collaborative Positioning for FutureG Wireless Systems

Future generation wireless systems are rapidly evolving to support positioning as a native feature using their communication infrastructure. Notwithstanding the dependence on a densely deployed infrastructure (for accurate positioning). We highlight the significant degradation due to the overhead of such an infrastructure-based positioning (IP) approach can bring communication performance warranting timely attention. We propose a fundamentally different paradigm of communication-aware collaborative positioning CO2P, whereby the burden of positioning is offloaded to client devices in an intelligent, communication-aware and collaborative (peer-peer) manner that reduces overhead and improves spatial reuse to preserve communication performance, without compromising on positioning accuracy. Through technically-sound algorithms CO2P addresses the underlying tradeoff between communication performance and positioning accuracy to deliver an efficient coexistence, providing a two-fold increase in both throughput and accuracy over conventional IP approaches. CO2P is also orchestrated as a practical, distributed, adoption-friendly solution that is realized using WiFi's positioning protocol.