Energy Consumption and Latency in BLE Devices under Mutual Interference: An Experimental Study

Bluetooth is a widely used technology for short range communications. Limited device density and frequency hopping based communication usually eliminates the chances of mutual interference among independent Bluetooth Pico nets. However, with the advent of Internet of Things, there is a sharp increase in Bluetooth-equipped devices, especially in wearable devices. This gives raise to multiple collocated Pico nets, thus increasing the mutual interference leading to performance degradation of Bluetooth communication. In this work, we study the latency and energy consumption by Bluetooth low energy (BLE) devices under the influence of mutual interference, which has not been studied in the literature. Based on the experimental results involving 32 BLE devices, we investigate the influence of mutual interference and develop models for energy consumption and latency. These models can be utilized in future BLE enabled devices.