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androidbluetooth-lowenergyibeaconaltbeacon
Jeffkid
Jeffkid

Reputation: 69

BLE Transmitting vs Receiving Energy Consumption

What is the difference in energy consumption for transmitting BLE beacons vs. scanning for them? I was thinking of making an application that scans for a particular beacon and begins to transmit its own beacon once the particular beacon has been received.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2434

Answers (1)

davidgyoung
davidgyoung

Reputation: 65005

Scanning takes much, much more energy that transmitting as a beacon -- at least 10x if not 100x as much.

The details of how much energy scanning takes depends on many factors, including how many bluetooth devices are in radio range (more devices use more energy to process the transmissions), whether bluetooth hardware filters are used to save battery, and whether full scanning is cycled on and off to save battery. There are also variances from one phone model to the next, largely based on the bluetooth chip's efficiency.

Scanning with hardware filters or conservative background cycled scanning typically uses a similar amount of battery as cell standby, meaning it is a significant but small usage of a phone's battery capacity.

Transmission, on the other hand, uses so little battery that it is difficult to measure.

More information on transmitter battery usage is available in my blog post here. I have also shown some measurements for scanning battery usage in one case here.

Upvotes: 8

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