Distance measurement using narrowband ZigBee devices

Zigbee, also known as IEEE 802.15.4 is a popular wireless communication standard developed for simple low-power and low-cost wireless applications. One of these applications is local positioning, which consists in inferring the position of a device in real time. In this paper, a new method to precisely measure distance using standard ZigBee devices is presented. The measurement uses only a 2 MHz bandwidth channel and compensate the lack of bandwidth by using an original technique for measuring Time Of Arrival. Simulations show that our method achieves a standard deviation of 33 cm, which is better than other approaches in the same testing conditions. The technique is tested under a real indoor environment, and the results are finally compared with the simulations.