An Automatic Power Consumption Measurement Procedure for Bluetooth Modules

This paper deals with a novel automated procedure to measure the actual power consumption of Bluetooth wireless modules, namely integrated circuits comprising both the radio-frequency and the base-band circuitry. The proposed approach is particularly valuable because it helps to estimate accurately the battery lifetime of portable items. In fact, it is known that wireless modules are the main cause of energy dissipation in small and middle-size wireless devices. As power consumption is intrinsically a time-varying quantity depending on the module activity, accurate measurements of average power can be achieved only by tightly synchronizing module and instrument operation. In order to address this issue, a virtual power meter based on a high-level finite state machine model of the Bluetooth protocol is described in the paper. Also, some experimental results validating the proposed procedure are reported