Smartphone-Based Indoor Localization Systems: A Systematic Literature Review
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors,
Your general idea and methodology approach of collecting and analyzing the relevant achievements from 2015 to 2022 in the field of indoor cell phone location are good. On some parts the paper seems like it was not finally edited yet.
My comments and some suggestions are in the attached file. Your thesaurus is sufficient, it is recommended to adjust the level of language syntax with a final check by a native speaker.
Best regards.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper presents a literature review of indoor positioning systems. Reviewing the state of the art in indoor positioning is essential due to its dynamically changing nature. Therefore this paper could be important for other researchers and be accepted for publication after major revision.
This paper gives a detailed review and comparison of existing indoor positioning solutions which is its main contribution. This organized and systematic review could help developers to identify trends and future directions in this topic.
On the other hand, the presentation of these results should be improved. The main trends should also be emphasized in the abstract, introduction, and conclusion.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Review electronics-2155239
Smartphone-based Indoor Localisation Systems: A Systematic Literature Review
Journal: Electronics
Manuscript ID: electronics-2155239
Type of manuscript: Systematic Review
Summary: The study conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) on smartphone-based indoor localization systems. SLR methodology and indoor localization both are interesting and attractive topics for me. I appreciate the efforts of the authors as they have done a great job by collecting data from 109 articles. However, there are major defects in the structure, methodology and presentation of the paper. I agree the topic is very much interesting and important; but there are several review articles on it. I did not find any comments on it why this study is required while several similar studies are already existing. Therefore, I will suggest revising the article carefully. I can review it again with some more technical comments once I see the following major changes in the paper.
Major Issues:
1. For a good review article, I assume there should be three points: (1) some reasons of motivations (2) there should be some logical classification which can improve the reading and presentation of the paper (3) some criterion of article selection/search. Although the authors have the 3rd point but it need further improvement the first two points are missing.
2. The structure of the paper and the methodology is not clear. It is not clear how this review article is different than several existing articles and why it is important? It is suggested to have a short overview of existing review articles (see for example section 1.3 from the recent SLR article [1] published in 2022; which is probably the most relevant and the first SLR on a very close topic).
3. The authors may have read [2] which provides a nice set of guidelines for the SLR and should follow it (and it is probably the first in computer science/software engineering field or at least earlier than [43] cited in the paper).
4. The total number of articles claimed with SLR final selection are 109 articles, whereas in the references the total articles are 117. However, from the article it is not clear which paper is included in the article selection and which is not. Some tabular representations like in [1] or [4] can clear this confusion.
5. It is strongly suggested to include some article through manual search and snowballing (see Fig. 2. in [1]); I assumed several relevant articles have been missed for example see section 4.4 in [1].
6. The second contribution is not clear stating that “It studies the various SLR protocol”. It actually means that you are conducting a review of existing reviews (SLR) i.e. a secondary review which is not true in your case; as you are collecting primary studies using SLR methodology.
7. It is not clear why the authors have not included ACM digital library in the sources for search where ACM is a top publisher in the field. For example, papers form ACM TOG, SIGGRAPH might be missed. Also, Springer and Wiley are missing.
8. The criteria for article selection are not clear. For example, there are a lot of articles using camera of smart phones (see marker-based methods in section 3.1 of [1]) for indoor localization. It should be clear whether the authors are only interested in smartphone, or the any mobile device (such as tablets) are also included? Only the sensors mentioned Figure 2 (c) are included or the camera-based localization is also included?
Minor Issues:
9. There is no article quality assessment, which is an important part of SLR for excluding relevant but low-quality articles. See [1,2].
10. The authors should also have a look over the IPIN conferences [3]
11. Section 2 is SLR protocol which mean a methodology; therefore section 3 should be with some other heading rather than methodology. It might be results OR data collected from SLR.
12. Where is figure 1 is wrongly numbered as figure 2.
13. Figure 1: The text over the figure should be cleared. The last two tabs should be primary and secondary selection.
14. Figure 2 (a) it is strange the number of participants lesser than 5 have 50% occurrences. Please double check it; also, what can be the possible reason for this should be discussed. Figure 2 (c) the indicates different types of sensors used; the key sensor in mobile devices is its camera which is not mentioned here.
15. English proofreading and rephrasing are required for example “Following is the summary of this study’s contribution:”
References:
[1] Khan, D.; Cheng, Z.; Uchiyama, H.; Ali, S.; Asshad, M.; Kiyokawa, K. Recent advances in vision-based indoor navigation: A systematic literature review. Comput. Graph. 2022, 104, 24–45.
[2] B. Kitchenham and S. Charters, “Guidelines for performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering,” Keele University, Keele, United Kingdom and Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom, Tech. Rep. EBSE 2007–001, 2007.
[3] International conference on Indoor Positioning Indoor Navigation (IPIN) http://ipin-conference.org/editions.html
[4] Khan, D.; Plopski, A.; Fujimoto, Y.; Kanbara, M.; Jabeen, G.; Zhang, Y.; Zhang, X.; Kato, H. Surface remeshing: A systematic literature review of methods and research directions. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 2020, 28, 1680–1713.
[5] https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04745
[6] https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ipsjjip/31/0/31_15/_article s
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
See attached pdf
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 3 Report
see attached file
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 4
Reviewer 3 Report
Smartphone-based Indoor Localization Systems: A Systematic Literature Review
I appreciate the efforts of the authors. The paper has been significantly improved. However, for some of my comments they wrongly answered. I hope they will understand it and make clarification of these points.
1. Table 4 presents method-wise classification of the articles. The authors claim in their response letter that all the articles have used only 3 methods i.e. ML, DL or Hybrid. I don’t agree. However, if it is incase true then why table 4 contains only few papers instead of all 113. Is it not good to classify all the 113 articles into these 3 categories?
2. In response letter, the authors states that “Reference [1] is talking about markers with smartphone, however our study focus on technology such as Wi-Fi, BLU, and so on , therefore, we have not included it in our study .” I don’t agree with this statement due to two reasons: (1) Please note that markers are traced with smartphone camera and it is mentioned in the paper that mentioned that 4% of the papers use camera. Similarly, you also mentioned Camera in Figure 4. (2) In research question 1, the authors they are interesting to find what technologies are used for indoor localization. If they want to exclude some technologies such as camera then they should clearly mention it in their inclusion and exclusion criterion and also update their research questions.
Table 2 and 3 should be merged into one table
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
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