Enhanced 5G Sidelink Ranging Based on Carrier Aggregation

Radio access network based positioning and ranging technologies become more and more important for autonomous driving. Positioning on the 5G Sidelink (SL) is discussed in Release 18 (2022-2024) of the Third Generation Partnership Project. For accurate timing-based ranging, a high temporal and spatial resolution is fundamental. The bandwidth for 5G SL positioning is limited due to sharing the existing SL resources with communication. Therefore, we send the positioning reference signal on two separate Component Carriers, i.e. we use a fragmented spectrum. We introduce a two step algorithm for estimating the time of arrival using the inflection point method. We proved a fragmented spectrum can achieve the same accuracy as a continuous spectrum.