Power consumption analysis of Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee and ANT sensor nodes in a cyclic sleep scenario

This paper is intended to guide developers of wireless systems who are puzzled by the vast number of radio configuration parameters and options. We provide experimental data comparing power consumption of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), ZigBee and ANT protocols for a cyclic sleep scenario, in which a short-range and low-power wireless sensor node periodically sends a data packet to a remote `hub' with intervening sleep intervals. Devices such as wearable health monitors often use this scenario when interfacing with a mobile phone-based hub. For all measured sleep intervals BLE achieved lower power consumption (10.1 uA, 3.3 V supply at 120 s interval), compared with ZigBee (15.7 uA), and ANT (28.2 uA). Most of the power consumption differences can be attributed to the time taken for a node to connect to the hub after waking up and the use of sleep between individual RF packets. For the three protocols we determined a sleep interval at which the tradeoff between power consumption and data rate is optimized.