Seeing the Trend of “5G+GNSS” in Intelligent Era

In the past two years, 5G went onto the stage. Telecom providers are building 5G base stations all over the world, China Mobile is one of them that has built over 400,000 base stations in China. 5G related products are introduced to the global market as well. As for the GNSS industry, it's also a breakthrough year. In the middle of 2020, BeiDou Global Navigation Satellite system was successfully established. Four main global navigation satellite systems (GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou and Galileo) can provide high precision PNT (Positioning, Navigation and Timing) data.

With the development of 5G and technology, the concept of smart city, Internet of Things and etc. are becoming more and more popular. We are moving from industrialization into the era of intelligence, the high precision spatiotemporal information service will permeate every aspect of our life, not only for the traditional related industries, but also for the newly vertical industries. Hence, to provide spatiotemporal service is to seize the golden opportunity of intelligent society and also the foundation of building an ecosystem of related industries.

How does 5G and GNSS make a fusion? The main advantage of 5G is high speed, high bandwidth and low latency, which can further satisfy the transmission requirements of some concepts like automated driving, VR/AR, industrial automation and so on. However, for absolute real-time PNT information can only be acquired from GNSS. It can be said that 5G realized the full use and explored more applications of high precision GNSS. There are two representative applications listed as follows:

- Automated Driving: In the past, unmanned driving was mainly limited to positioning accuracy and transmission latency. A delay of 0.1s could cause meter-level errors. 5G can achieve ns-level transmission and currently high precision GNSS can provide cm and mm positioning accuracy, which perfectly broke this restriction. In the future, the IoV (Internet of Vehicles) and UGV will offer high efficiency and convenience to our daily life.

- Smart Power Grid: The power supply is the foundation no matter to an individual or a society. For the large-scale power grid, it is necessary to strictly control the synchronization of current frequency and phase. Inaccurate timing can lead to waste of power, damage of instruments, even the collapse of power grid. 5G + GNSS brings the smart grid, which will be more reliable, cost-effective, secure and environment friendly.

China Mobile, as one of the biggest telecom providers in China, plays the leading role in 5G construction. Since 2019, it has started the HAP (High Accuracy Positioning) Project, aiming to establish a high precision CORS network covering the whole China. With the cooperation of ComNav Technology, a leading company in the high precision GNSS industry, China Mobile has successfully built thousands of high-precision reference stations over the whole China.

At the end of 2020, China Mobile announced that the 5G+GNSS high precision positioning network has been preliminarily established. It is not only a strong combination of the communication industry and high precision GNSS industry, but will also benefit related and vertical industries.

The first step of China Mobile is to energize the intelligent transportation system, including promoting the development of IoV, auto-driving and auto-parking. Then it will be extended to infrastructure, national power grid, full-coverage of disaster monitoring and other industries that are closely related to our daily life.
With the popularization of 5G+GNSS technology, high precision positioning and timing will be realized anywhere and anytime. In the era of intelligence, unexpected convenience and safety will be obtained.