Evolution of Indoor Positioning Technologies: A Survey

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. © 2017 ramon f. brena et al.