Indoor Positioning Systems as Critical Infrastructure: An Assessment for Enhanced Location-Based Services

As the demand for context-aware services in smart environments continues to rise, Indoor Positioning Systems (IPSs) have evolved from auxiliary technologies into indispensable components of mission-critical infrastructure. This paper presents a comprehensive, multidimensional evaluation of IPSs through the lens of critical infrastructure, addressing both their technical capabilities and operational limitations across dynamic indoor environments. A structured taxonomy of IPS technologies is developed based on sensing modalities, signal processing techniques, and system architectures. Through an in-depth trade-off analysis, the study highlights the inherent tensions between accuracy, energy efficiency, scalability, and deployment cost—revealing that no single technology meets all performance criteria across application domains. A novel evaluation framework is introduced that integrates traditional performance metrics with emerging requirements such as system resilience, interoperability, and ethical considerations. Empirical results from long-term Wi-Fi fingerprinting experiments demonstrate the impact of temporal signal fluctuations, heterogeneity features, and environmental dynamics on localization accuracy. The proposed adaptive algorithm consistently outperforms baseline models in terms of Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), confirming its robustness under evolving conditions. Furthermore, the paper explores the role of collaborative and infrastructure-free positioning systems as a pathway to achieving scalable and resilient localization in healthcare, logistics, and emergency services. Key challenges including privacy, standardization, and real-world adaptability are identified, and future research directions are proposed to guide the development of context-aware, interoperable, and secure IPS architectures. By reframing IPSs as foundational infrastructure, this work provides a critical roadmap for designing next-generation indoor localization systems that are technically robust, operationally viable, and ethically grounded.