Mobile Positioning Techniques and Systems: A Comprehensive Review

The recent developments in mobile positioning technologies and the increasing demands of ubiquitous computing have significantly contributed to sophisticated positioning applications and services. Position information represents a core element in the human-centred activities, assisting in visualising complex environments effectively and providing a representational coordinate for localisation, tracking, and navigation purposes. The emergence of smartphones has accelerated the development of cutting-edge positioning-based systems since they are contained to have more processing, memory, and battery power. Similarly, mobile devices are now equipped with new sensory capabilities, wireless communications, and localisation technologies. This has quadrupled towards new advances on positioning techniques, enhancing the existing ones and brought more value to positioning-based systems. Research studies in positioning techniques have progressed in different directions, and no work has categorised and assessed the various advancements in this area. Accuracy and precision are the two challenging aspects that are crucial to the proper functioning of a positioning system. In practice, there is not a single positioning technique that could be appropriate for different situations. Most of the survey papers have focussed on carrying out their review on conventional positioning techniques. The common positioning technique uses simple technologies and is applied to a single type of environment. Hybrid techniques are the next generation of positioning technique that is supporting the real and com plex environment. This paper presents a comprehensive review on the mobile positioning techniques and systems. A total of 21 positioning systems published between the years 2012 and 2018 in the top 5 most popular indexed databases are reviewed. The positioning techniques are identified and streamlined through a methodical process, and the selected ones are reviewed using derived parameters. This paper provides a significant review of the current state of the mobile positioning techniques and outlines the research issues that require more investigation.