Artificial Intelligence in Visible Light Positioning for Indoor IoT: A Methodological Review

Indoor communication and positioning are significant fields of applications for indoor Internet of Things (IoT) given the rapid growth of IoT in smart cities, smart grids, and smart industries. Visible light positioning (VLP) has become more and more attractive for researchers to provide indoor location-aware IoT services. Additionally, artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted considerable research effort to address the challenges in visible-light communication (VLC) systems. This is an emerging technology in next-generation wireless networks. However, despite the rapid progress, the use of AI in localization, navigation, and position estimation is still underexplored in VLC systems, and various research challenges are still open. This methodological review summarizes the research efforts regarding the use of AI in the field of VLP, to improve the position estimation accuracy in both two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) indoor IoT applications. This treatise also presents open issues and potential future directions for motivating further research in the field. Various databases were utilized in this paper: Scopus, Google Scholar, and IEEE Xplore; obtained 88 papers from 2017 to early 2023. Most (68%) of the AI articles in VLP systems are machine learning (ML) methods applied for localization and position estimation in VLC systems, while the other 32% of the research articles focussed on evolutionary algorithms. ML and evolutionary models may present limitations in terms of complexity and time-consuming nature but offer highly accurate, robust, reliable, and cost-effective results in terms of position estimation over conventional approaches.