Accurate and Precise Distance Estimation from Phase-Based Ranging Data

Many localization approaches need distance measurements to known locations as input. We present the Complex-valued Distance Estimation algorithm to compute the distance between two radio transceivers from phase measurements. Our proposed algorithm reliably computes the distance from a sampled phase response via Fast Fourier Transform. We compare the new approach with two other state-of-the-art algorithms by evaluating distance errors of real-world measurements in different scenarios. Our algorithm achieves high accuracy and precision with a mean error of 14.9 cm and a standard deviation of 10.4 cm. Further, we evaluate the ability of all algorithms to detect outliers with large errors in their results. We optimize our approach to reduce computation complexity via interpolation without affecting accuracy or precision.