Evolution of Indoor Positioning Technologies: A Survey

Abstract EN

Indoor positioning systems (IPS) use sensors and communication technologies to locate objects in indoor environments.

IPS are attracting scientific and enterprise interest because there is a big market opportunity for applying these technologies.

There are many previous surveys on indoor positioning systems; however, most of them lack a solid classification scheme that would structurally map a wide field such as IPS, or omit several key technologies or have a limited perspective; finally, surveys rapidly become obsolete in an area as dynamic as IPS.

The goal of this paper is to provide a technological perspective of indoor positioning systems, comprising a wide range of technologies and approaches.

Further, we classify the existing approaches in a structure in order to guide the review and discussion of the different approaches.

Finally, we present a comparison of indoor positioning approaches and present the evolution and trends that we foresee.