This paper proposes a novel time of arrival (TOA) estimation method which achieves the sub-chip resolution. In this proposed method, the sparsity of the wireless channel is utilized to adopt the emerging technique of compressive sensing (CS) for accurate TOA estimation. The received signal is first processed to make the sensing matrix satisfy the restrict isometry property requirement of CS framework; then the signal samples with the amplified noise are removed to improve the recovery performance; finally, the dantzig selector method is used to recover the sparse channel for TOA estimation.