A ray-traced digital twin for 5G NR positioning with OpenAirInterface

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 timedifference-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.