One important aspect when choosing a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) solution is to analyze its energy consumption for various connection parameters and desired throughput to build an optimal low-power Internet-of-Things (IoT) application and to extend the battery life. In this paper, energy consumption and data throughput for various BLE versions are studied. We have tested the effect of connection interval on the throughput and compared power efficiency relating to throughput for various BLE versions and different transactions. The presented results reveal that shorter connection intervals increase throughput for read/write transactions, but that is not the case for the notify and read/write without response transactions. Furthermore, for each BLE version, the energy consumption is mainly dependable on the data volume. The obtained results provide a design guideline for implementing an optimal BLE IoT application.
Keywords: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE); Internet of Things (IoT); Wireless Sensor Network (WSN); performance evaluation; power estimation.