Power consumption analysis of Bluetooth low energy commercial products and their implications for Internet of things applications

Internet of things (IoT) is a concept that includes different kinds of devices: computers, tablets, smartphones and everyday objects. These devices include embedded sensors that share information between each other and that can be controlled via the Internet. Therefore, an IoT environment will use these smart objects as the main components to enable business and consumers to connect to the Internet and share data. Given these points, the estimation is that 50 billion devices will be connected by 2020, thus posing considerable market opportunities for those companies investing in IoT. It is important to note that the Bluetooth low energy protocol (BLE) is widely used as the wireless communication protocol for IoT applications and is included in many of the hardware platforms available in the market. Additionally, BLE was designed as an ultra-low power consumption protocol in order to allow the devices to work with coin cell batteries. For this reason, it is very important to understand the power consumption of a hardware platform in order to implement an efficient IoT application. This doctoral dissertation presents the required background to understand the protocol and the main connection parameters and presents the setup and procedures to calculate and measure the power consumption of different Bluetooth low energy commercial platforms. In addition, based on the power consumption of the hardware platforms configured as a central or peripheral device, a design guideline is provided to select the required connection parameters of the Bluetooth protocol in order to maximize the battery life of the platform for a given IoT application