Empirical Study of Location Services in 5G Networks

Nowadays the urgency to precisely position a target terminal is more and more present in both for public use, and for private use in the industrial environment. This is due to the ever increasing need by applications such as, e.g., web mapping and navigation platforms, to continuously monitor the position of a user equipment. Prominent use cases from the business domain call for technologies offering and handling location services, and by design the 5G mobile network represents one of such technologies. The aim of the thesis is to design and develop a framework for gathering, elaborating, and exposing location information in a 5G system for non-public use by leveraging standard 3GPP interfaces. The thesis is developed in three parts, the first one being the state of art of location services in 5G systems (comprising a review of privacy-related aspect), while the second and third contain the design of the functional blocks that compose the framework and the validated implementation design, respectively. In particular, a prototype of a 5G-standard compliant location management function is proposed. Due to technical limitations of open-source tools, which limit the interoperability testing scope, a second design is proposed and eventually implemented. An off-the-shelf positioning algorithm is leveraged and embedded in the implementation of the location management function. The overall framework is tested under different types of request for user location. The achieved results focus on the communication and interoperability of the involved network entities with respect to the efficiency and accuracy of the position estimation of the target terminal.