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

The rising demand for location-based services is accelerating the deployment of indoor positioning systems (IPS) 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 centimetre- 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 paper 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 ultra-wideband (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 favourable overall QPoS under line-of-sight conditions and a pre-existing 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 non-standardized QPoS metrics, a lack of reference testbeds and protocols, limited 2.5D/3D and mobility evaluations under realistic multipath and industrial lighting, hardware and transmitter limitations, ambient-light interference, shadowing and multipath effects, and unresolved latency–reliability trade-offs. 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-PD receiver studies, hybridizing with other systems, exploring reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, and developing standardized benchmark suites and protocols.