Energy-Efficient Communication Protocols for IoT Networks

Abstract

The explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has intensified the need for communication protocols that minimize energy consumption while preserving reliability, latency guarantees, and scalability. This paper surveys energy-efficient protocol families across short-, medium-, and long-range IoT, including IEEE 802.15.4/TSCH with RPL, BLE Mesh, Wi-Fi HaLow (802.11ah), LoRaWAN, and 3GPP NB-IoT. We present a cross-layer perspective on duty-cycling, synchronization, adaptive modulation and coding (AMC), topology control, and traffic-aware MAC scheduling, and we discuss security overheads and their energy implications. A comparative analysis highlights design trade-offs (energy per delivered kilobyte, packet delivery ratio, latency, and deployment complexity). Finally, we synthesize engineering patterns for selecting and tuning protocol stacks under application constraints (event-driven sensing vs. periodic telemetry; indoor vs. outdoor; sparse vs. dense deployments).