Statistical Real-time Power Consumption Analysis of Wi-Fi and BLE Scan Operation: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The widespread prevalence of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth or its low-power version, Bluetooth low energy (BLE), in modern society has significantly increased their use for setting up wireless connectivity in various Internet-of Things (IoT)-based applications, such as patient monitoring, indoor localization and environment monitoring. The growing demand for integrating efficient power management solutions into these IoT applications has motivated us to focus on the measurement and analysis of power consumption during wireless scan activities using Wi-Fi and BLE since these are crucial for the connection establishment. Although a few research exists on the measurement and analysis of power consumed by wireless technologies like Wi-Fi, BLE and Zigbee in the literature, none have paid attention to the accurate measurement and analysis of real-time power consumption during wireless scan operations at the application level. To address this gap, we have designed a novel mobile application for the accurate measurement of real-time power consumption during wireless scan operations in order to assess the energy efficiency of various IoT applications involving those wireless technologies. Extensive experimentation was carried out in this study to measure real-time power consumption during Wi-Fi and BLE scans as well as operations without any scans (i.e., no scan) at varying durations and distances of the measuring device from the beacon. Additionally, a comparative statistical analysis of the collected power measurements under three different cases (Wi-Fi scan, BLE scan and no scan) using mean, median and standard deviation was performed to demonstrate the real-time power consumption usage patterns of these operations. This is followed by an insightful discussion on the influence of duration and distance on such power consumption patterns. Furthermore, several avenues for future research based on the findings of this study are also presented here.