BLE phase-based ranging: accuracy and capability under strong Wi-Fi interference
Abstract
Abstract— Indoor positioning and asset tracking have become popular and essential for different applications and use cases. Many systems use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless personal area network technology for communication and ranging purposes. Unfortunately, due to limitations of the ISM radio band, other communication technologies such as Z-Wave, ZigBee, and Wi-Fi also use the same frequency bandwidth. This overlap often leads to interference that affects the performance of BLE systems. This work evaluates the effect of Wi-Fi interference on the phase-based ranging distance estimate for different BLE to Wi-Fi signal power ratios. We show the random distance error increasing more than 3 times for both Inverse Fourier Transform and Multiple Signal Classification algorithms at short distances. Based on simulation results and infield experiments, we identified that the interference becomes marginal for distances more than 10m, and the device can’t identify the location correctly in case of similar Wi-Fi and BLE Tx power. In the case of long-distance ranging, ignoring interfered frequencies improves the situation dramatically, but this results in worse resolution and sometimes may identify the distance incorrectly due to false peaks.
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