What battery life could I expect from an average OpenThread router, leader and end point?

[nix64bit]

Is it advisable to use coin cell battery power for nodes besides end-devices in a Thread mesh network? Where can I find technical comparison between OpenThread and BLE?

[Marjeris Romero]

Hi Peter,

These are some difficult questions to answer as power/current consumption is something that is highly application dependable. A FTD device needs to be ready to receive packets at any time, which translate in high power consumption and as a rule of thumb these devices should be mains powered.

It is possible to use coin cell battery for sleepy end-devices, if you want more information about power consumption in SEDs I found two analysis done by Thread group here:

https://www.threadgroup.org/Portals/0/documents/support/BatteryOperatedDevicesWhitePaper_656_2.pdf

https://www.threadgroup.org/Portals/0/documents/support/TheValueofLowPowerWhitepaper_2454_2.pdf

Still, it is difficult to recommend you the best option to power up a device. You would need to characterize the current consumption of your application and create some model to estimate the power consumption over time. The current consumption of a device will depend on how often the radio needs to be ON to either be able to receive or transmit. For sleepy end devices this will be highly dependent on your application poll period.

For a technical comparison between OpenThread and BLE, this is kind of comparing oranges and apples. If we are talking about mesh networking we don't have any side by side comparison but you can take a look at Torbjørn's answer in this post. Both 802.15.4 radio protocols and BLE mesh solutions require a high level of radio activity and will not be very much low power.

If you want to do current measurements yourself, I would recommend buying the Power Profiler Kit which will show real-time current consumption of the device, making it easy to see current consumption in various modes and applications.

Best regards,

Marjeris

[nix64bit]

Hello Marjeris,

Thanks for the in depth answer, I will look at the options and suggestions you gave.

Low power seems to be quite complex

Thank you,

Peter