Accuracy of Joint Time-Based and Carrier-Phase Positioning in 5G Networks under Correlated Measurement Errors

High-accuracy positioning is critical for emerging applications such as autonomous driving, industrial automation, augmented reality, and smart cities. 3GPP Release 18 introduced carrier-phase (CP) positioning for 5G that offers superior accuracy compared to conventional time-based methods such as time of arrival (ToA). However, CP-based positioning requires resolving the integer phase ambiguity, which refers to the unknown number of full-wavelength cycles completed during signal propagation. Joint processing of ToA and CP can mitigate this integer ambiguity by narrowing down the search space of possible integers, particularly for short wavelengths. This paper investigates the performance of a positioning method that integrates ToA and CP measurements. As a main contribution, the analysis explicitly accounts for the error correlation between ToA and CP measurements. Furthermore, the study analyzes the impact of key 5G system parameters on positioning accuracy using this correlation-aware joint method in both factory and urban environments, where many 5G positioning applications are expected to emerge. The results highlight that exploiting this correlation can further improve positioning performance by approximately 7 percent. Moreover, the findings of this study provide insight into how 5G system parameters can be tuned to achieve centimeter-level accuracy under favorable conditions.