Bluetooth Low Energy: The Developer's Handbook

Chapter 2. Basic Concepts

In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

—IETF RFC 1925, Rule 12

To understand Bluetooth low energy is to understand how low power consumption can be achieved in a short-range wireless system. The most basic design decisions are all built around enabling low power consumption in typical use cases.

Bluetooth low energy is not trying to optimize Bluetooth classic; instead, it is targeted at new market segments that haven’t previously used open wireless standards. These market segments are those that require devices to send a few octets of data from once a second to once every few days. These are monitoring and control applications ...