The Power Consumption of Bluetooth Scatternets

Abstract

Low power has become a primary concern in the field of ad–hoc and personal area networks. As manufacturers start endowing their designs with scatternet support, Bluetooth is emerging as a key enabling technology. Although this is driving research on Bluetooth power optimization, most proposals in the literature are based on either oversimplified, fully theoretical, or old and inadequate power models. We present a real–world power model of a Bluetooth device supporting scatternets and sniff–mode, and validate it experimentally for the BTnode, an ad–hoc and sensor network prototyping platform developed at ETH Zurich. Whilst guaranteeing a low computational complexity, the model achieves a 4% RMS error.