I am trying to use an Android device to transmit Eddystone beacons. I would like to know the approximate battery drain the device consumes to transmit beacons in the background. Thanks.
Good news! The battery drain of transmitting as a beacon from a mobile phone is negligible. I did some tests on both Android and iOS to measure this drain, and found to my surprise that I couldn't even come up with a number. The drain was so small it was within the margin of error of the test setup.
The Android version of these tests happened to use the Android Beacon Library to transmit an AltBeacon frame, but I have seen similar results using the same library to transmit an Eddystone frame. And since the library simply wraps lower-level Android APIs, these numbers are applicable regardless of what API you are using to set up the transmission.
See this blog post for details.