Power Characterization of a Bluetooth-based Wireless Node for Ubiquitous Computing

Ubiquitous computing refers to making many computing devices available throughout the physical environment, while making them effectively invisible to the user. To further increase the applicability of ubiquitous computing, minimizing energy consumption and hardware cost are mandatory in real world applications. In this paper we present our platform prototype for ubiquitous computing, which has been implemented based on commercial Bluetooth off-the-shelf components. It allows every object to be augmented with processing and communication capabilities in order to make them "smart". We investigate the power characteristic of our Bluetooth prototype and provide helpful information for protocol developer and software designers. Our prototype has been used in a museum application to support spontaneous and ubiquitous connections between devices without requiring a priori knowledge of each other.