I am developing an application to estimate the distance to a BLE Beacon using its RSSi values measured from a Mobile Phone. But when I started to collect data I could see that they varied so much that I cannot possibly estimate the distance using the values. Even though I implemented mean and median filters with various window sizes, the RSSI values are highly varying. Is this a common problem with RSSI values ? Is there a way to eliminate/filter out these variations so that I can input them to a distance modal ? Help is greatly appriciated.
Dear Ravindu,
It seems that your channel from the transmitter to the receiver is relatively rapidly varying with time possibly due to multi path fading. The channel could be a Rayleigh scattering channel.
The solution could be to fit the RSSI with Rayleigh channel response from which you can get the average received power that can be considered a function of the link length. The other solution which is a practical solution is to calibrate the RSSI with link distance.
If you give more description of the communication channel one can propose a suitable method. One of the best method is to see for a free line of sight path between the beacon and the receiver.
Best wishes
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