Positioning for the Internet of Things: A 3GPP Perspective

Many use cases in the Internet of Things (IoT) will require or benefit from location information, making positioning a vital dimension of the IoT. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has dedicated a significant effort during its Release 14 to enhance positioning support for its IoT technologies to further improve the 3GPP-based IoT eco-system. In this article, we identify the design challenges of positioning support in Long-Term Evolution Machine Type Communication (LTE-M) and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), and overview the 3GPP's work in enhancing the positioning support for LTE-M and NB-IoT. We focus on Observed Time Difference of Arrival (OTDOA), which is a downlink based positioning method. We provide an overview of the OTDOA architecture and protocols, summarize the designs of OTDOA positioning reference signals, and present simulation results to illustrate the positioning performance.