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To address the structural limitations of GNSS, the mobile industry has spent roughly the last decade turning terrestrial cellular infrastructure into a complementary positioning layer. In 3GPP standardization, this transition became much more explicit with Release 16, which introduced both the “5G positioning services” and “NR positioning support” work items, while the stage-2 architecture for user-equipment positioning in next-generation radio access networks (NG-RANs) had already been formalized in Technical Specification (TS) 38.305.
From that point onward, positioning in cellular systems was no longer treated as a marginal add-on for emergency services alone but as a core enabler for industrial automation, robotics, public safety, transportation, and other latency- and integrity-sensitive use cases. In other words, 5G positioning began to evolve as a network–native complement to GNSS, particularly for environments where satellite signals are weak, blocked, or operationally unreliable.
Full Article: IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine, Volume 21, Number 2, June 2026
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