Cooperative Passive Coherent Location: A Promising 5G Service to Support Road Safety

5G promises many new vertical service areas beyond simple communication and data transfer. We propose cooperative passive coherent location (CPCL), a distributed MIMO radar service, which can be offered by mobile radio network operators as a service for public user groups. CPCL comes as an inherent part of the radio network and takes advantage of the most important key features proposed for 5G. It extends the well-known idea of passive radar (also known as passive coherent location, PCL) by introducing cooperative principles. These range from cooperative, synchronous radio signaling and MAC up to radar data fusion on the sensor and scenario levels. By using software-defined radio and network paradigms, as well as real-time mobile edge computing facilities intended for 5G, CPCL promises to become a ubiquitous radar service that may be adaptive, reconfigurable, and perhaps cognitive. As CPCL makes double use of radio resources (in terms of both frequency bands and hardware), it can be considered a green technology. Although we introduce the CPCL idea from the viewpoint of vehicle-to-vehicle/infrastructure communication, it can definitely also be applied to many other applications in industry, transport, logistics, and for safety and security applications.