A System-Level Power Behavior Model for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Coexistence in Dual-Mode Wireless Devices

Abstract

Dual-mode wireless devices that implement Bluetooth and Wi-Fi in the same physical layer platform and share a single 2.4 GHz antenna must manage the mutual interference and power consumption that arise from concurrent operation of two radio systems in overlapping spectrum. The coexistence challenge encompasses both the RF interference dimension, where simultaneous Bluetooth and Wi-Fi transmissions in the 2.4 GHz ISM band produce adjacent-channel and cochannel collisions that degrade throughput and packet error rate for both protocols, and the power consumption dimension, where the activation states of the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi transceivers, power amplifiers, and baseband processors interact to produce aggregate device power profiles that determine battery life in portable IoT and wearable applications. This paper presents a system-level power behavior model for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi coexistence in dual-mode wireless devices, developed from current profiling measurements of the transmit, receive, and idle current states of the Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 6 radio subsystems under a range of coexistence configurations including time-division multiplexing, adaptive frequency hopping, and packet traffic arbitration. The model characterizes the power contribution of each protocol as a function of its duty cycle, packet size, data rate, and coexistence mode, and aggregates the per-protocol contributions into a system-level power model that predicts the average current consumption of the dual-mode device under mixed Bluetooth and Wi-Fi traffic loads. The model is assessed through measured current profiles from a commercial Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 6 combo module under controlled traffic conditions and demonstrates a mean prediction error of 3.2 percent across the evaluated operating scenarios. Applications of the model to battery life estimation for IoT wearable devices and to coexistence mode selection for optimal power efficiency are presented.