Adaptive online power-management for Bluetooth Low Energy

Bluetooth Low Energy is a time-slotted wireless protocol aimed towards low power communication for battery-driven devices. As a power-management capability, whenever there is less data to send, the slave is allowed to remain in a low power mode during a given number of time-slots in a row. However, since the master does not know the exact sleep behavior of the slave, it has to wake-up at every time-slot and repeat its packets until the slave is awake. As a result, applications with variable throughput lead to many energy-consuming idle-slots at the master. In such applications, usually the connection parameters are chosen considering the worst case at design time and remain constant during operation. In this paper, we propose a novel power-management framework for BLE. Rather than skipping slots at the slave side, the proposed system updates the interval between two consecutive time-slots during runtime by applying online algorithms. To avoid data-loss or high delays, the framework guarantees that constraints on latency are met and buffers never overflow. Energy measurements of three different test-cases show that up to 42 percent of the energy consumption of a BLE master can be saved with our power management system.