A Ray-Traced Digital Twin for 5G NR Positioning with OpenAirInterface
Abstract
Evaluating 5G positioning on a physical testbed ties every measurement to one propagation environment and one antenna layout, so any question about an alternative deployment requires a new field campaign. We present a ray-traced digital twin of the GEO-5G testbed at EURECOM that drives an unmodified OpenAirInterface (OAI) 5G stack with per-antenna channels computed by Sionna-RT over a 3D model of the site. The distributed gNB antennas are modelled as independent radio devices rather than as elements of a compact array, which preserves the per-antenna absolute delays on which time-difference-of-arrival (TDoA) positioning depends. With them preserved, the twin drives OAI's SRS-based UL-TDoA pipeline to metre-level accuracy consistent with that reported for the physical deployment. We then use the twin to answer a question the physical testbed cannot. Widening the carrier truncates the tail of the horizontal error distribution without improving a typical position, and leaves the vertical error untouched, because the latter is limited by the array geometry rather than by the measurement. That limit is predictable from the antenna coordinates alone, and a height-diverse layout reduces the RMS height error by a factor of four.
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BibTeX
@misc{chaharbaghi2026raytraced,
title = {{A Ray-Traced Digital Twin for 5G NR Positioning with OpenAirInterface}},
author = {Nima Chaharbaghi and Florian Kaltenberger and Bartosz Podrygajlo and Rakesh Mundlamuri and Roberto Verdone},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.13138},
eprint = {2610.13138},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13138},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A Ray-Traced Digital Twin for 5G NR Positioning with OpenAirInterface
AU - Nima Chaharbaghi
AU - Florian Kaltenberger
AU - Bartosz Podrygajlo
AU - Rakesh Mundlamuri
AU - Roberto Verdone
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/09
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.13138
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13138
AB - Evaluating 5G positioning on a physical testbed ties every measurement to one propagation environment and one antenna layout, so any question about an alternative deployment requires a new field campaign. We present a ray-traced digital twin of the GEO-5G testbed at EURECOM that drives an unmodified OpenAirInterface (OAI) 5G stack with per-antenna channels computed by Sionna-RT over a 3D model of the site. The distributed gNB antennas are modelled as independent radio devices rather than as elements of a compact array, which preserves the per-antenna absolute delays on which time-difference-of-arrival (TDoA) positioning depends. With them preserved, the twin drives OAI's SRS-based UL-TDoA pipeline to metre-level accuracy consistent with that reported for the physical deployment. We then use the twin to answer a question the physical testbed cannot. Widening the carrier truncates the tail of the horizontal error distribution without improving a typical position, and leaves the vertical error untouched, because the latter is limited by the array geometry rather than by the measurement. That limit is predictable from the antenna coordinates alone, and a height-diverse layout reduces the RMS height error by a factor of four.
ER -