Survey on Indoor Positioning Techniques and Systems

Navigating different devices and human beings in indoor scene has become very crucial for number of tasks specially in automated system. The efficiency of outdoor positioning has become excellent due to the development of GPS. However lots of mass market applications require very excellent positioning capabilities in almost every environments. As a result, indoor positioning has attracted the researchers attention and has been a focus of research during the past decades. This paper presents an overview of the four typical indoor localization schemes namely triangulation, trilateration, proximity and scene analysis are analyze and discussed. Moreover it gives a detailed survey of different positioning systems which are being both research-oriented solutions and commercial products and also attempts to classify the different systems into different groups based on the technology used. We categorized all 11 sighted wireless indoor positioning systems into 6 distinct technologies namely Infrared signals, radio frequency, ultrasound waves, vision-based analysis, electromagnetic waves, and audible sound and explains the measuring principles of each. These approaches are characterized and their key performance parameters are quantified individually. For a better understanding, these parameters are briefly compared in table form for each system so as to outline the trade-offs from the viewpoint of a user.