6.27 Positioning services

22.2613GPPRelease 18Service requirements for the 5G systemTS

6.27.1 Description

5G positioning services aims to support verticals and applications with positioning accuracies better than 10 meters, thus more accurate than the ones of TS 22.071 [24] for LCS. High accuracy positioning is characterized by ambitious system requirements for positioning accuracy in many verticals and applications, including regulatory needs.

In Location-Based-Services and eHealth, higher accuracy is instrumental to new services and applications, both outdoor and indoor.

For example, on the factory floor, it is important to locate assets and moving objects such as forklifts, or parts to be assembled. Similar needs exist in transportation and logistics, for example rail, road and use of UAVs. In some road user cases, UE’s supporting V2X application(s) are also applicable to such needs. In cases such as guided vehicles (e.g. industry, UAVs) and positioning of objects involved in safety-related functions, availability needs to be very high.

Mission Critical Organizations require mission critical services to have accurate positioning such that first responders can be located at all times during normal and critical operations, indoors as well as outdoors. The level of positioning accuracy (and other KPIs) required is much more stringent than that required by local and regional regulatory requirements for commercial 5G users.

6.27.2 Requirements

The 5G system shall provide 5G positioning services in compliance with regulatory requirements.

NOTE 1: example of regulatory requirements encompasses requirements on emergency calls (e.g. e911), reliability and safety requirement (RAMS) applicable to some use cases and verticals, implementation of Priority, Precedence, Preemption (PPP) mechanisms to ensure sufficient reliability metrics are reached.

The 5G system shall provide different 5G positioning services, supported by different single and hybrid positioning methods to supply absolute and relative positioning.

NOTE 2: hybrid positioning methods include both the combination of 3GPP positioning technologies and the combination of 3GPP positioning technologies with non-3GPP positioning technologies such as, GNSS (e.g. Beidou, Galileo, GPS, Glonass), Network-based Assisted GNSS and High-Accuracy GNSS, Terrestrial Beacon Systems, dead-reckoning sensors (e.g. IMU, barometer), WLAN/Bluetooth-based positioning.

The 5G system shall enable an MCX UE to use the 5G positioning services to determine its position with the associated uncertainty/confidence of the position, on request, triggered by an event or periodically.

The 5G System shall be able to provide the 5G positioning services in case of roaming.

The 5G system shall support mechanisms to determine the UE’s position-related data for period when the UE is outside the coverage of 3GPP RAT-dependent positioning technologies but within the 5G positioning service area (e.g. within the coverage of satellite access).

The 5G system shall be able to make the position-related data available to an application or to an application server existing within the 5G network, external to the 5G network, or in the User Equipment.

NOTE 3: the position service latency can be tailored to the use cases.

The 5G system shall be able to manage and log position-related data in compliance with applicable traceability, authentication and security regulatory requirements.

The 5G network shall be able to request the UE to provide its position-related-data on request—together with the accuracy of its position—triggered by an event or periodically and to request the UE to stop providing its position-related data periodically.

NOTE 4: This requirement does not preclude whether the position is computed in the UE or elsewhere in the 5G System (e.g. core network).

The 5G system shall support mechanisms to configure dynamically the update rate of the position-related data to fulfil different performances (e.g. power consumption, position service latency) or different location modes.

NOTE 5: for example, the 5G System needs to be able to request the UE to provide its location periodically with an update rate ranging from one location every [1 s to 10 s] in location normal mode to one location every [30 s to 300 s, or more] in location power saving mode. The 5G System needs to allow UEs to sleep for extended periods (e.g. one week), without requiring the UE to update its position data.

The 5G system shall allow the UE to trigger a different update rate of the position-related data based on whether the UE is moving or not.

The 5G system shall be able to determine the position-related data of the 5G positioning services with any update rate ranging from one set of position-related data every 0,1 s to one set of position-related data every month.

NOTE 6: the position service latency can be tailored to the use cases.

The 5G System shall be able to negotiate the positioning methods according to the operator’s policy or the application’s requirements or the user’s preferences and shall support mechanisms to allow the network or the UE to trigger this negotiation.

The 5G system shall supply a method for the operator to configure and manage different positioning services for different users.

The 5G system shall be able to determine the reliability, and the uncertainty or confidence level, of the position-related data.

The 5G system shall be able to access to the positioning methods used for calculating the position-related data and to the associated uncertainty/confidence indicators.