Precise Energy Modeling for the Bluetooth Low Energy Protocol

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a wireless protocol optimized for low-power communication. 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. 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 the well-known Bluetooth Basic Rate (BR) significantly, models for Bluetooth BR cannot be easily applied to the BLE protocol. In past years, 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 article presents an energy model of the BLE protocol, which 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. Based on this model, guidelines for system designers are presented that help choose the right parameters for optimizing the energy consumption. The model is publicly available as a software library for download.