Location and Positioning Systems: Performance and Comparison

In the age of automation the ability to navigate persons and devices in indoor/outdoor environments has become important for many applications. With the apparition of the Global satellite Positioning Systems (GPS), the performance of outdoor positioning provide good location estimates and provide high accuracy rate. But, they cannot be used in indoor environments due to the weakness of their signals in the lack of line of sight between the GPS satellites and the receiver Mobile Station. Therefore, indoor positioning systems need alternative means to detect the Mobile Station's location without counting on the direct radio frequency signal from GPS satellites. In this paper we are interested on the local positioning Systems (LPS), which are an extension of the GPS in the absence of GPS covering, in close spaces. So we are presenting a revision of the Location and Positioning System (LPS), techniques, algorithms and characteristics, and finally a comparison between the Geometric and Gauss-Newton method to select the accurate one.