A Look at the Recent Wireless Positioning Techniques With a Focus on Algorithms for Moving Receivers

Employment of ground-based positioning systems has been consistently growing over the past decades due to the growing number of applications that require location information where the conventional satellite-based systems have limitations. Such systems have been successfully adopted in the context of wireless emergency services, tactical military operations, and various other applications offering location-based services. In current and previous generation of cellular systems, i.e., 3G, 4G, and LTE, the base stations, which have known locations, have been assumed to be stationary and fixed. However, with the possibility of having mobile relays in 5G networks, there is a demand for novel algorithms that address the challenges that did not exist in the previous generations of localization systems. This paper includes a review of various fundamental techniques, current trends, and state-of-the-art systems and algorithms employed in wireless position estimation using moving receivers. Subsequently, performance criteria comparisons are given for the aforementioned techniques and systems. Moreover, a discussion addressing potential research directions when dealing with moving receivers, e.g., receiver's movement pattern for efficient and accurate localization, non-line-of-sight problem, sensor fusion, and cooperative localization, is briefly given.