Angle-of-Arrival Measurement Techniques for Enhanced Positioning in Beyond 5G Systems

The new generation of mobile communication systems introduces new methods and technologies that may enhance positioning accuracy in some scenarios when the GNSS system cannot meet the requirements, such as indoor positioning and outdoor autonomous driving. The 3GPP standard and for the first time included the angle measurement as new positioning methods in 5G. The Angle of Arrival (AoA) is the angle measurement method on the uplink direction that can enjoy the new capabilities in 5G systems to enhance the positioning downs to centimeters.The new generation of mobile communication systems introduces new methods and technologies that may enhance positioning accuracy in some scenarios when the GNSS system cannot meet the requirements, such as indoor positioning and outdoor autonomous driving. The 3GPP standard and for the first time included the angle measurement as new positioning methods in 5G. The Angle of Arrival (AoA) is the angle measurement method on the uplink direction that can enjoy the new capabilities in 5G systems to enhance the positioning downs to centimeters. Multiple Signal Classification Method (MUSIC) is a high-accuracy super-resolution algorithm for AoA estimation. The MUSIC method for estimating AoA has many shortcomings that make it unsuitable for a wide variety of scenarios. Correlated multipath signals substantially reduce estimation accuracy. Additionally, this method is a searching algorithm that requires a significant amount of time to resolve AoA. In this thesis, a CASCADE algorithm was proposed to overcome MUSIC's constraints by estimating a coarse range of AoA using a rapid AoA algorithm and then passing that range to the second stage represented by MUSIC to estimate AoA correctly. Multipath signals were eliminated by modifying the proposed CASCADE to detect only the line of sight (LOS), which is the essential path for angular localization. Additionally, the thesis compares many AoA algorithms in the context of 5G systems. A sounding reference signal (SRS) in the mm-wave band was generated according to the 3GPP standards and utilized as the input to those algorithms. A simulation was conducted throughout this thesis by evaluating six AoA algorithms: Bartlet Beamforming, MVDR, MUSIC, ESPRIT, FFT, and the proposed CASCADE method. The results showed that the proposed algorithm achieves the best performance when using less than 64 array antenna elements. On the other hand, FFT alone can provide high accuracy when using an ultra massive antenna system (e.g., 256,512,1024). Additionally, the findings observed the effect of key parameters on the performance of AoA algorithms, such as low SNR, a small number of snapshots (samples), and the effect of multipath signals