Improving road safety by high-frequency 5G localization and sensing

Research Project, 2021

Localization and tracking of vehicles and vulnerable road users is an important component in ensuring safety in current and future transportation systems. Mobile radio signals (4G) can provide some level of position information (on the order of 1-10 meters). To be of use in traffic safety, this performance should be improved to around 20 cm. Such accuracy will allow fine-grained situational awareness and the localization of people, needed to prevent accidents. As most road users will have 5G devices, all traffic participants can be tracked and localized using 5G signals. At Chalmers, we have unique expertise and equipment to investigate 5G and Beyond 5G technologies for this purpose. Our research is based on a world-leading distributed MIMO testbed at Chalmers, which we plan to transition from the current setup at 2.3 GHz with 80 MHz bandwidth to a 5G-compliant millimeter-wave frequency of 28 GHz with 200-400 MHz bandwidth. With this, we aim to harness the increases in angle and delay resolution to demonstrate high-accuracy localization of vehicles and road users.