Will using a whitelist reduce my power consumption scanning on BLE

[tyler]

I have a central device that uses BLE to scan for a specific device (there is only a single device it can bond with). Right now it checks the UUID and the mac address of all peripheral devices it finds and checks if they are correct. I'm wondering what impact switching this to a white list will have. Will it reduce power consumption?

[Hung Bui]

I think it actually does reduce your power consumption by using whitelist.

Whitelisting is done by the radio itself, so if you can avoid having the radio and then the softdevice to process the advertising packet and forward to the application an event and then in your application checking out if the address matched or not. It could be much more than just a few instructions. If you have a lot of unwanted advertising packets, it could save good amount of processing time and power consumption of the CPU.

But the radio can't whitelist the UUID though.

[Hung Bui]

The only advantage of directed advertising is the short advertising interval. This can reduce the connection establishment latency (and the scanning time) significantly but consume more power on the peripheral side. If you are scanning for only one device (stop scanning after one connection) then it would slightly reduce current consumption on the central side but consume more on the peripheral side.