Andra Blaga

Every year millions of lives are lost in emergency situations. Localizing missing people in the shortest possible timeframe is the most effective tool to reduce such a death toll. However, this is challenging when the victims are unable to communicate by themselves or located in large and difficult-to-reach areas. Current technological approaches for victim localization are often rendered inoperable under obstacles or low visibility conditions, or due to the lack of cellular networking infrastructure. Toward addressing these issues, we present 3DSAR+, a pioneering single-drone 3D cellular SAR solution leveraging 5G-NR technology. 3DSAR+ system introduces dynamic autonomous 3D UAV trajectories in diverse and challenging environments, offering a robust tool for first responders in SAR missions. The main novelty of the proposed approach lies in advanced distance and angle estimation combined with ML algorithms for position prediction and correction. The approach is able to estimate victims’ locations through their mobile phones without requiring extra equipment and improves localization accuracy by an order of magnitude compared to baseline solutions.

With the proliferation of connected devices and the increasing demand for more precise and reliable positioning information, the fusion of 5 G and GNSS localization systems holds immense potential to overcome the current limitations of standalone approaches. In order to tackle this challenge, in this paper we explore the potential of the fusion of 5G-NR and satellite localization systems to jointly enhance their accuracy and reliability. The designed solution, termed 5GNSS , is explained in detail, describing its five main building blocks and corresponding mathematical foundations. An extensive performance evaluation has been conducted, considering urban, suburban, and rural vehicular scenarios, as well as a varying number of visible satellites and 5 G base stations. Our results show that 5GNSS can outperform standalone GNSS, 4G-LTE and 5G-NR positioning systems consistently across all these scenarios with an average error reduction in the $\sim$ 60-40% range. Based on these results, we conclude that future positioning systems would strongly benefit from incorporating 5GNSS-like fusion solutions.