Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE), also known as Bluetooth Smart is a LR-WPAN (Low Range

Wireless Personal Area Network) protocol. It has become very popular in a various
application areas like fitness trackers, healthcare, home automation, etc. It is
supported by all major operating systems like iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, etc.
and all major devices like phones, tablets and laptops. This support by the major
players is feeding back into more BTLE devices coming out in the market.

BTLE is expected to play a big role in the IoT as well apart from the various other
domains. It offers good range, throughput, security, flexibility in topology, etc.
But above all, it provides the ability to let the remote devices, peripherals run
on very low energy. BTLE devices can function for more than a year on a coin cell
battery.

It is interesting to see how BTLE achieves this very low power consumption.

As a matter of fact, the standard is designed with low energy consumption as one of
the most important goals for the peripheral devices (e.g. fitness tracker, heart
rate monitor, etc.)

BTLE is designed to use a single coin cell battery which can typically store a
total of 230mAh with peak current capacity of 15mA. A coin cell battery provides
longer life if current is drawn in short bursts instead of longer durations. To
gain the best out of a coin cell battery, BTLE makes its activities of shorter
durations. The protocol uses small packet sizes which can be transmitted and
received in a short duration. This is applicable to both - device discovery as well
as data exchange.

The device discovery mechanism is made efficient by transmitting the advertisements

on only 3 channels, and only at specific configurable intervals. The peripheral
follows its own timing to transmit advertisements on the 3 advertising channels.
This reduces the transmit time and saves power. The scanner device does not know
when these transmissions occur and hence needs to scan the advertising channels
much more frequently, if to continuously. Thus the longer duration and hence more
power consuming functionality is pushed to the device which has more resources.

The peripherals are designed to sleep as much as possible to conserve energy. This
reduces the battery drain significantly.

The link layer controller is made autonomous to some extent so that it can handle a
few functions on it own without waking up the higher layers in the peripheral
device. This allows the rest of the device circuitry to sleep and save energy.

The data exchange uses only single fundamental packet format. The packets are small
in size. This obviously reduces the packet transmission and reception times,
resulting into shorter peak current draws from the battery. The radio remains on
for shorter duration thus saving more battery. A side benefit is that radio does
not heat up and hence there is no need for continuous or frequent radio
calibration. Radio calibration could be an energy expensive procedure.

The smaller packet size also implies that the peripheral device can work well with
a smaller memory footprint. Since memory refresh requires power, reducing the
amount of on-board memory results into lower power requirements for the peripheral.

Using a single fundamental packet format for protocol data exchange demands lesser
processing complexity, lesser memory requirements and hence more power saving.

These are the simple and smart ways by which the BTLE becomes low energy. Of
course, these tricks do have some side effects which affect the performance. But
that is a topic of a separate discussion.