Emerging Development of Wireless Localization Technologies Aided with Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: A Comprehensive Survey

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Wireless localization technologies have undergone a paradigm shift with the advent of the emerging trend which is the Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs). This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art RIS-aided localization techniques, exploring the transformative impact of intelligent surfaces on location-based services. The survey comprehensively reviews existing wireless localization methods, ranging from the localization techniques in the wireless communications generations. It addition the challenges posed by conventional localization methods are discussed, including accuracy and coverage issues. In response to these challenges, the incorporation of RIS is explored as a promising paradigm to enhance the precision and reliability of wireless localization. The core of the paper focuses on the integration of RIS into localization systems, highlighting how these RISs can be strategically deployed to enhance accuracy, mitigate multipath effects, integration in different propagation environment and solve non feasible localization problems. The survey encompasses a wide range of applications, including outdoor positioning, indoor positioning, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, showcasing the versatility of RIS-aided localization across various scenarios. Also, critical design aspects are examined, including propagation regions, hardware requirements, deployment strategies, necessary measurements, multiplexing, and signalling systems.