Survey of challenges and towards a unified architecture for location systems

Localization is a key aspect of emergent applications in the medical, industrial and consumer field. In this article we survey state of the art, identify current challenges and issues for localization systems and suggest a unified layered architecture. The analysis reveals that challenges cannot be addressed in an isolated manner for example, energy consumption is tied to the choice of algorithm and employed hardware. To separate various challenges and investigate them independently, we propose the concept of position providers. Position providers in the lower layers allow abstraction of positioning methods, positioning algorithms and positioning hardware. Thereby, a position provider encapsulates methods, algorithms and hardware. Furthermore, we suggest a classification of position providers inspired by related work. We propose a unified architecture for location systems which uses positioning and integration layers as main building blocks.