RAIL-5G: A Challenging Real-World Dataset and Benchmark for AI-Based 5G Indoor Localization

Overview & Synopsis

Reliable radio-based indoor localization is essential for industrial automation, yet existing methods are often evaluated in environments that do not fully reflect the severe multipath and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions encountered in real deployments. This limits our understanding of how AI, i.e., modern geometric, unsupervised, and semi-supervised localization methods generalize to industrial 5G settings. We present RAIL-5G, a public real-world 5G NR channel impulse response (CIR) benchmark recorded in an operational railway maintenance facility. RAIL-5G covers an 811m$^2$ indoor area with eight distributed radio units, robot-mounted user equipment (UE) trajectories, high-accuracy iGPS reference positions, and severe metal-induced multipath caused by train compartments and maintenance infrastructure. We benchmark geometric time-difference of arrival (TDoA), supervised fingerprinting, unsupervised channel charting, and self-supervised wireless pretraining methods. Our results highlight the difficulty of RAIL-5G: on the full dataset, TDoA reaches 7.02m mean average error (MAE), the best unsupervised method reaches 2.46m, and supervised fingerprinting achieves 0.52m. Self-supervised pretraining reduces the labeling effort by up to one order of magnitude, but the remaining gap to supervised learning shows that robust AI-based localization under severe multipath remains an open challenge. The dataset and code are available at https://iis.fraunhofer.de/rail-5g.