Energy Modeling for the Bluetooth Low Energy Protocol

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a wireless protocol well suited for ultralow-power sensors running on small batteries. It is optimized for low power communication and is not compatible with the original Bluetooth, referred to as Bluetooth Basic Rate (BR)/Enhanced Data Rate (EDR). BLE is described as a new protocol in the official Bluetooth 4.0 specification. It reuses many parts of the Bluetooth BR hardware and software stack to enable dual mode devices supporting Bluetooth BR/EDR and BLE. To design energy-efficient devices, the protocol provides a number of parameters that need to be optimized within an energy, latency and throughput design space. To minimize power consumption, the protocol parameters have to be optimized for a given application. Therefore, an energy-model that can predict the energy consumption of a BLE-based wireless device for different parameter value settings, is needed. As BLE differs from Bluetooth BR significantly, models for Bluetooth BR cannot be easily applied to the BLE protocol. Since the last one year, there have been a couple of proposals on energy models for BLE. However, none of them can model all the operating modes of the protocol. This paper presents a precise energy model of the BLE protocol, that allows the computation of a device's power consumption in all possible operating modes. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed model is not only one of the most accurate ones known so far (because it accounts for all protocol parameters), but it is also the only one that models all the operating modes of BLE. Furthermore, we present a sensitivity analysis of the different parameters on the energy consumption and evaluate the accuracy of the model using both discrete event simulation and actual measurements. Based on this model, guidelines for system designers are presented, that help choosing the right parameters for optimizing the energy consumption for a given application.

BLE Parameter Optimization for IoT Applications

“…To the best of our knowledge, there is no performance evaluation using these profiles and there is no evaluation considering the scanner as a peripheral device with constrained DL and energy consumption. The analytical model proposed by Kindt et al [4] can be used to determine the right configuration depending on application constraints. But results from this kind of model are very general and might require very long computation time.…”

“…In this paper, we present an extension and optimization of the model proposed by Kindt et al [4] in Section III. Then we propose a method for parameter optimization in Section IV.…”

Neighbor Discovery Latency in BLE-Like Protocols

“…Besides our proposed theory, this model is the only one which predicts upper bounds (for T a < d s , only). Further, we have considered the predicted mean latencies of the model by Cho et al [27], [28] and the accelerated simulation model by Kindt et al [26], with ∆ = 93.12 s and = 0.99 into this comparison. Figure 11.…”

“…Figure 11. Comparison to the models Liu:12 [23], [24], [25], [15], Cho:15 ([27], [28]), Kindt:13 [26], our proposed model and a simulation of BLE.…”

“…Like in growToRight(), this case has three subcases. If N l γ n − r ≥ d s holds true, the partial latency is (for both m n+1 = s and m n+1 = g) (26) d p = pN l σ n d f .…”