Power Allocation and Parameter Estimation for Multipath-Based 5G Positioning

We consider a single-anchor multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing system with imperfectly synchronized transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) clocks, where the Rx estimates its position based on the received reference signals. The Tx, having (imperfect) prior knowledge about the Rx location and the surrounding geometry, transmits reference signals based on a set of fixed beams. We develop strategies for the power allocation among the beams aiming to minimize the expected Cramer-Rao lower bound for Rx positioning. Additional constraints on the design are included to make the optimized power allocation robust to uncertainty on the line-of-sight (LOS) path direction. Furthermore, the effect of clock asynchronism on the proposed allocation strategies is studied. Our evaluation results show that, for non-negligible synchronization error, it is optimal to allocate a large fraction of the available power for the illumination of the non-LOS (NLOS) paths, which help resolve the clock offset. In addition, the complexity reduction achieved by our proposed suboptimal approach incurs only a small performance degradation. We also propose an off-grid compressed sensing-based position estimation algorithm, which exploits the information on the clock offset provided by NLOS paths, and show that it is asymptotically efficient.