Evaluation of the Trade-Off between Power Consumption and Performance in Bluetooth Based Systems

To further increase the applicability of Bluetooth in real applications, reducing the energy consumption and hardware cost are important research topics. In this paper we examine the trade-off between power consumption and performance for our experimental prototype, which has been implemented based on commercial Bluetooth off-the-shelf components. Performance analysis shows that the use of the sniff mode is compatible with the use of multi- slot data packets. However, when the channel conditions require selecting single slot data packets, the sniff mode could have a negative impact on performance, and so the power/delay trade-off must be taken into consideration. Our prototype has been used in a museum application to support ubiquitous computing between devices without requiring a priori knowledge of each other.