Online Power Management for Latency-Sensitive Bluetooth Low-Energy Beacons

Bluetooth low energy (BLE) is a wireless protocol that provides low power communication for battery-driven embedded devices. To achieve a better tradeoff between energy consumption and communication latency, an advertising interval parameter is included in the protocol to extend the BLE beacon sleep time. This article presents a power management mechanism, including the advertising interval initialization to meet the latency constraints of broadcasting applications, the advertising interval adaptation to minimize the resubmission overhead from the run-time collision, and the scanner-aware packet scheduler to provide better quality-of-service for applications with multiple rates. Evaluation results show considerable energy savings using the proposed algorithms and a real platform study provides validation.