IMDEA Networks research on location management function in 5G wins ‘Best Student Paper award’ at IEEE NFV-SDN

The paper has been carried out in collaboration with the University of Saint Louis

02 December 2022

The work ‘Characterizing Location Management Function Performance in 5G Core Networks’ (Andrea Pinto, Giuseppe Santaromita, Claudio Fiandrino, Domenico Giustiniano, and Flavio Esposito) has won the “Best student paper” award at IEEE NFV-SDN conference, which took place in November at Chandler (Arizona, USA). The study is based on the assessment of the performance of 5G network function modules as essential to offering location services: the implementation complies with the 3GPP standard (3rd Generation Partnership Project is an umbrella term for a number of standards organizations that develop protocols for mobile telecommunications) and OpenAirInterface, the currently most advanced framework that implements a full 5G-New Radio stack.

Our Research Associate Professor Domenico Giustiniano says: “5G localization has achieved great attention in industry and standardization bodies. However, the integration of 5G network function modules designed for localization lack experimental work. Assessing the performance of these modules is essential to offering location services”.

For their part, postdoctoral researchers Giuseppe Santaromita and Claudio Fiandrino point out that “the 3GPP, since Release 16, has been proposing a module to handle functionalities for position measurements between the core network and the users”. And they add: “However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no available implementation. In our work, we designed and implemented this 5G Location Management Function (LMF), the key 5G network function for localization services.”

Dr. Giustiniano emphasizes the functionalities of the research (“realized at IMDEA Networks premises”): “Our implementation of the LMF module can serve several domains. Industry 4.0, autonomous vehicles, emergency services, augmented reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) for mobile health and precision agriculture are examples of commercial use cases with critical requirements for localization accuracy and reliability according to the 5G specifications.”

At the same time, he highlights the collaboration with the University of Saint Louis, USA, during the visit of the PhD student Andrea Pinto at IMDEA Networks. “His advisor, Flavio Esposito, has great expertise in 5G network functions, and this work has been an example of how combining knowledge from different domains can result in impactful work,” he concludes.