Study on the trade off between throughput and power consumption in the design of bluetooth low energy applications

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is an emerging technology that is considered a breakthrough in the field of wireless communications due to its very low power consumption property. One of the issues of the current practical implementations of BLE is throughput. The theoretical throughput of BLE is around 260 Kbps but the current practical implementations have much lower throughput values. In this work, the effect of important parameters related to the BLE connection and the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) protocol on the throughput and power consumption of the system has been studied based on practical laboratory experiments. The throughput was found to increase almost linearly with the number of characteristics and characteristic size used in a BLE application. Additionally, the throughput was found to have an inverse relationship with the connection interval. The average current consumed while the device is connected was found to have a proportional relationship with the number of characteristics and characteristic size and therefore the battery life of a BLE device is greatly affected by these variables. Understanding these results is crucial to BLE system designers and developer because it allows them to design their systems in a way that suits their needs optimally