Bluetooth LE Channel Sounding Developer's Guide#

Channel Sounding (CS) is a new feature introduced as part of the Bluetooth core specification 6.0 to enable distance estimation between two Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) devices.

In CS, two devices, known as Initiator and Reflector, exchange information that is measured to provide timing and frequency synchronization, and produce accurate distance estimate between them. It achieves this using Phase Based Ranging (PBR) and Round-Trip Time (RTT) measurement approaches. You can find more information in the Fundamentals section.

Silicon Labs provides modularized software sample projects for the Initiator and Reflector that can be extended to address different use case scenarios. In addition, Silicon Labs offers a reference implementation of a Real-Time Locating (RTL) library, which facilitates distance estimation using CS.

The rest of this Developer's Guide is organized as follows:

Prerequisites: Provides all prerequisites needed to build, program, and use the CS sample projects.

Documentation: Describes where the CS documentations and API reference manual can be found.

Supported Boards: Describes Silicon Labs radio board offering with support for Bluetooth channel sounding.

Sample Applications: Describes the software architecture, configuration, building and running procedures of the provided sample projects.

Simplicity Studio Channel Sounding Analyzer: Describes how to use the Simplicity Studio Channel Sounding Analyzer tool for visualizing and debugging purposes.

Channel Sounding Performance Metrics: Describes how to use the Simplicity Studio Channel Sounding Analyzer tool for visualizing and debugging purposes.

Known Issues and Limitations: Lists the issues and limitations known at publication.

Calibration of Silicon Labs Distance Ranging: Discusses the theory and procedure of calibrating a Silicon Labs channel sounding SoC for accurate distance ranging.