  Current and future wireless applications strongly rely on precise real-time
localization. A number of applications such as smart cities, Internet of Things
(IoT), medical services, automotive industry, underwater exploration, public
safety, and military systems require reliable and accurate localization
techniques. Generally, the most popular localization/ positioning system is the
Global Positioning System (GPS). GPS works well for outdoor environments but
fails in indoor and harsh environments. Therefore, a number of other wireless
local localization techniques are developed based on terrestrial wireless
networks, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and wireless local area networks
(WLANs). Also, there exist localization techniques which fuse two or more
technologies to find out the location of the user, also called signal of
opportunity based localization. Most of the localization techniques require
ranging measurements such as time of arrival (ToA), time difference of arrival
(TDoA), direction of arrival (DoA) and received signal strength (RSS). There
are also range-free localization techniques which consider the proximity
information and do not require the actual ranging measurements. Dimensionality
reduction techniques are famous among the range free localization schemes.
Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is one of the dimensionality reduction technique
which has been used extensively in the recent past for wireless networks
localization. In this paper, a comprehensive survey is presented for MDS and
MDS based localization techniques in WSNs, Internet of Things (IoT), cognitive
radio networks, and 5G networks.
