Support-Aware Telemetry Compression for 5G Positioning via Conditional Conflict Graphs
Abstract: Geographically separated transmission/reception points (TRPs) report quantized measurements to a Location Management Function (LMF), even when the application requires only a coarse location region. We formulate this task as a distributed zero-error function-computation problem, in which each TRP transmits an index sufficient for the LMF to reproduce the required service decision. Since positioning geometry induces a sparse and nonrectangular support, independently constructed per-terminal characteristic-graph colorings are not necessarily jointly decodable. We introduce a conditional conflict graph that exactly characterizes valid single-terminal updates and develop an alternating codebook construction that preserves global zero-error decodability. In a reproducible three-TRP study with range-equivalent timing measurements and $120$ native bins, all resulting codebooks satisfy an explicit decoder-conflict test. For service-cell sizes up to $100$ m, the achieved ideal rate is $5.38$--$5.44$ bits per epoch per TRP, compared with $6.91$ bits for raw reporting and $6.56$--$6.87$ bits for a globally valid interval-based baseline. A complementary measured six-base-station TDoA study shows that $83.77\%$ of the learned native support recurs on an independent trajectory. For these recurrent tuples, the codebooks preserve the service decision exactly and reduce the ideal rate by $22.8$--$35.6\%$ for $2$--$8$ m service grids. The feasible report-tuple set also provides a single-epoch geometric-consistency check under injected timing bias. Finally, we identify the NRPPa/OpenAirInterface integration points and safeguards required for experimental implementation.