Enhanced Fingerprint-Based Positioning With Practical Imperfections: Deep Learning-Based Approaches

Journal article, 2025

High-precision positioning is vital for cellular networks to support innovative applications such as extended reality, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Existing positioning algorithms using deep learning techniques require vast amounts of labeled data, which are difficult to obtain in real-world cellular environments, and these models often struggle to generalize effectively. To advance cellular positioning techniques, the 2024 Wireless Communication Algorithm Elite Competition(1)1 This competition was sponsored by Huawei Ltd. and further details can be found at https://wireless.yuny.top/#/ was conducted, which provided a dataset from a three-sector outdoor cellular system, incorporating practical challenges such as limited labeled-dataset, dynamic wireless environments within the target and unevenly-spaced anchors, Our team developed three innovative positioning frameworks that swept the top three awards of this competition, namely the semi-supervised framework with consistency, ensemble learning-based algorithm and decoupled mapping heads-based algorithm. Specifically, the semi-supervised framework with consistency effectively generates high-quality pseudo-labels, enlarging the labeled-dataset for model training. The ensemble learning-based algorithm amalgamates the positioning coordinates from models trained under different strategies, effectively combating the dynamic positioning environments. The decoupled mapping heads-based algorithm utilized sector rotation scheme to resolve the uneven-spaced anchor issue. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed positioning algorithms compared to existing benchmarks in terms of the {90%, 80%, 67%, 50%} percentile and mean distance error.