Ad Hoc & Sensor Wireless Networks Vol. 8, pp. 141–159 ©2009 Old City Publishing, Inc. Reprints available directly from the publisher Published by license under the OCP Science imprint, Photocopying permitted by license only a member of the Old City Publishing Group Trade-off Between Power Consumption and Performance in Bluetooth Juan-Carlos Cano 1 , José-Manuel Cano 2 , Carlos T. Calafate 1 , Eva González 2 and Pietro Manzoni 1 1 Department of Computer Engineering, Technical University of Valencia, Spain 2 Electronics Technology Department, University of Malaga, Spain E-mail: jucano@disca.upv.es Received: December 15, 2007. Accepted: December 24, 2008. Advancements in communication technologies, coupled with an increase of computer’s performance, are allowing us to enter the age of ubiq- uitous computing. The Bluetooth communication standard appears as a major solution in this new arena. Bluetooth was designed targeting low- power systems from the beginning, and this design criteria should be maintained for Bluetooth to be widely accepted in the marketplace. In this paper we investigate the power characteristics of the Bluetooth tech- nology when supporting low-power modes. We provide accurate power consumption measurements for different Bluetooth operating modes. Such information could be used to drive technical decisions on battery type and design of Bluetooth-based end systems. Finally, we examine the trade-off between power consumption and performance for a commercial off-the- shelf Bluetooth device. We find that the use of the sniff mode could be quite compatible with the use of multi-slot data packets. However, when the channel conditions require selecting single slot data packets, the sniff mode could have an impact on performance, and so the power/delay trade-off must be taken into consideration. Keywords: Bluetooth, power consumption, performance evaluation. 1 INTRODUCTION The widespread advent of wireless networks and the rapid proliferation of handheld computing devices have made mobile computing possible. In addi- tion, the miniaturization of devices and low power wireless communication standards have paved the path towards a pervasive computing environment [1]. 141