A Review of the Quality of Positioning Service of VLP Within the Indoor Positioning System Landscape

Abstract

The rising demand for location-based services (LBSs) is accelerating the deployment of indoor positioning systems (IPSs) and driving the need for stricter quality of positioning service (QPoS) requirements. Leveraging existing illumination infrastructure, visible light positioning (VLP) is a promising low-cost candidate for centimeter- to decimetre-level localization, but its real-world QPoS—spanning accuracy, availability, latency, robustness, scalability, energy use, and cost—is not yet well characterized. Existing IPS literature, including VLP studies, mostly prioritizes accuracy, and no comprehensive, literature-based QPoS comparison of positioning technologies currently exists. This article presents a focused review of VLP from a broad QPoS perspective and situates it within the IPS landscape. We propose a reproducible, normalized QPoS framework to enable holistic, fair cross-study comparisons. Through a review of published experimental and simulation studies, we analyze how different classes of VLP approaches perform with respect to QPoS and position them relative to other IPS technologies, including ultrawideband (UWB), Wi-Fi/Bluetooth low energy (Wi-Fi/BLE), and vision/inertial measurement unit (vision/IMU) hybrids. It is shown that VLP can exceed the accuracy of many IPS technologies and can approach UWB-level performance, with a favorable overall QPoS under line-of-sight conditions and a preexisting suitable lighting infrastructure. Nevertheless, its suitability remains application-specific, as no IPS technology—including VLP—optimizes all QPoS dimensions simultaneously, and performance varies with deployment and calibration. Our review highlights several unresolved challenges in VLP research, including nonstandardized QPoS metrics, a lack of reference testbeds and protocols, limited 2.5-D/3-D and mobility evaluations under realistic multipath and industrial lighting, hardware and transmitter limitations, ambient-light interference, shadowing and multipath effects, and unresolved latency–reliability tradeoffs. To address these challenges, we propose future research on exploiting VLP signals of opportunity, optimizing transmitter planning, reducing driver/modulator cost, and characterizing hardware nonidealities, advancing multi-photodiode (PD) receiver studies, hybridizing with other systems, exploring reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), and developing standardized benchmark suites and protocols.