Wireless Positioning: Technologies, Applications, Challenges, and Future Development Trends

The development of the fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication systems has entered the commercialization stage. 5G has a high data rate, low latency, and high reliability that can meet the basic demands of most industries and daily life, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), intelligent transportation systems, positioning, and navigation. The continuous progress and development of society have aroused wide concern. Positioning accuracy is the core demand for the applications, especially in complex environments such as airports, warehouses, supermarkets, and basements. However, many factors also affect the accuracy of positioning in those environments, for example, multipath effects, non-line-of-sight, and clock synchronization errors. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the existing works about positioning for the future wireless network and discusses its key techniques and algorithms, as well as the current development and future directions. We first outline the current traditional positioning technologies and algorithms, which are discussed and analyzed with the relevant literature. In addition, we also discuss application scenarios for wireless localization. By comparing different positioning systems, the challenges and future development directions of existing wireless positioning systems are prospected.