Latency and Power Consumption in 2.4GHz IoT Wireless Mesh Nodes: An Experimental Evaluation of Bluetooth Mesh and Wirepas Mesh

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things paradigm is pushing the need to connect billions of battery-operated devices to the internet and among them. To address this need, the introduction of energy-efficient wireless mesh networks based on Bluetooth provides an effective solution. This paper proposes a testbed setup to accurately evaluate and compare the standard Bluetooth Mesh 5.0 and the emerging energy-efficient Wirepas protocol that promises better performance. The paper presents the evaluation in terms of power consumption, energy efficiency, and transmission latency which are the most crucial features, in a controlled and reproducible test setup consisting of 10 nodes. Experimental results demonstrated that Wirepas has a median latency of 2.83ms in Low-Latency mode respectively around 2s in the Low-Energy mode. The corresponding power consumption is 6.2mA in Low-Latency mode and 38.9µA in Low-Energy mode. For Bluetooth Mesh the median latency is 4.54ms with a power consumption of 6.2mA at 3.3V. Based on this comparison, conclusions about the advantages and disadvantages of both technologies can be drawn.