Indoor Positioning Systems Based on Visible Light Communication: State of the Art

Advances in visible light communication (VLC) technology and the ubiquity of illumination facility have led to a growing interest in VLC-based indoor positioning. Numerous techniques have been proposed to obtain better system performance. In this paper, we survey over 100 papers ranging from pioneering papers to the state-of-the-art in the field to present the positioning technology. Not only the light emitting diode technology, modulation method and types of receivers are compared but also a novel taxonomy method is proposed. In this paper, VLC-based indoor positioning systems (VLC-based-IPSs) are classified based on the methods used: 1) mathematical method; 2) sensor-assisted method; and 3) optimization method. Different from other survey works, we emphasize and analyze the accuracy of VLC-based-IPS in the experiment and simulation environments. Meanwhile, this paper illustrates challenges, countermeasures, and lessons learned.