A feasibility study of RIP using 2.4 GHz 802.15.4 radios

This paper contains a feasibility study of Radio Interferometric Positioning (RIP) implemented on a widely used 2.4 GHz radio (CC2430). RIP is a relatively new localization technique that uses signal strength measurements. Although RIP outperforms other RSS-based localization techniques, it imposes a set of unique requirements on the used radios. Therefore, it is not surprising that all existing RIP implementations use the same radio (CC1000), which operates below the 1 GHz range. This paper analyzes to what extent the CC2430 complies with these requirements. This analysis shows that the CC2430 platform introduces large and dynamic sources of errors. Measurements with a CC2430 test bed in a line-of-sight indoor environment verify this. The measurements indicate that the existing RIP algorithm cannot cope with these types of errors, and will incur a relatively low accuracy of 3.1 meter. Based on these results, we made an initial implementation of a new algorithm, which can cope with these errors, and decreases this positioning error by a factor of two to 1.5 meter accuracy.