December 21, 2021
Professor Samarjit Chakraborty was awarded the ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) 2021 Best Paper Award for his paper, “Energy Modeling for the Bluetooth Low Energy Protocol,” which appeared in the journal in 2020.
The paper, which was authored by Philipp H. Kindt of the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany, Daniel Yunge of the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso in Chile, Robert Diemer of ASC GmbH in Germany and Chakraborty, was selected from all papers that appeared in the journal between 2019 and 2020. The award was presented in a virtual ceremony at the 2021 Embedded Systems Week.
Wireless devices have become ubiquitous in today’s society with the adoption of wireless headphones, earbuds, wireless keyboards, wireless speakers and other tools. The key to of all these is a wireless technology standard called Bluetooth. Today, there are billions of Bluetooth devices, and this number is rapidly increasing as we move more into the Internet-of-Things era, where many household articles–from light bulbs to door knobs–are being remotely programmed and controlled.
Bluetooth devices, however, are often powered by batteries that can run unexpectedly, and wireless communication consumes a significant amount of energy. Hence, configuring the Bluetooth protocol correctly is especially important to ensure that its energy consumption is minimized. While there are multiple variants of Bluetooth, one of the more widely used versions today is the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, which–as its name implies–has a similar communication range as the Bluetooth Classic but significantly lower power consumption.
BLE offers a number of protocol parameters whose values determine energy consumption, communication latency and throughput, but energy models for Bluetooth Classic do not hold for BLE due to differences in the protocols. There has never been an energy model for BLE to determine ideal parameter values for a given application requirement.
The paper authored by Chakraborty and his collaborators was the first to propose a complete energy model for BLE, making it easier than ever to mitigate energy consumption issues. The collaboration on this project began when Chakraborty was a professor at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, where Kindt and Yunge were graduate students and Diemer was a postdoctoral scholar.
The paper can be read online via the ACM Digital Library or on Chakraborty’s website.