Investigation of ranging capabilities with Bluetooth Low Energy : how can we effectively estimate the range between a (commercial off the shelf) BLE beacon and a BLE receiver (locator)?

With the rapid advancement of wireless technologies, positioning systems have become very popular. Applications in the area of logistics such as asset tracking or inventory management require localisation accuracy in the range of a few meters. Among available solutions Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is an innovative technology that delivers high accuracy while maintaining low power consumption. In order to locate a device, several approaches can be used. In this report we investigate a phase-based ranging system that makes use of the complete bandwidth of Bluetooth and study how practical system constraints affect distance estimation accuracy.