Bluetooth: HCI Power Control

Overview

This sample application demonstrates the dynamic Tx power control over the LL of the BLE controller via Zephyr HCI VS commands. The application implements a peripheral advertising with varying Tx power. The initial advertiser TX power for the first 5s of the application is the Kconfig set default TX power. Then, the TX power variation of the advertiser is a repeatedly descending staircase pattern ranging from -4 dBm to -30 dBm where the Tx power levels decrease every 5s.

Upon successful connection, the connection RSSI strength is being monitored and the Tx power of the peripheral device is modulated per connection accordingly such that energy is being saved depending on how powerful the RSSI of the connection is. The peripheral implements a simple GATT profile exposing the HR service notifying connected centrals about a dummy HR each 2s.

Requirements

  • BlueZ running on the host, or

  • A board with BLE support

  • A central device & monitor (e.g. nRF Connect) to check the RSSI values obtained from the peripheral.

Building and Running

This sample can be found under samples/bluetooth/hci_pwr_ctrl in the Zephyr tree.

See bluetooth samples section for details.