Evaluating Distance-Induced Performance Trade-offs in IoT: Simple Automatic ReQuest vs. TCP and UDP

In critical sectors like healthcare, banking, and surveillance, Internet of Things (IoT) applications require reliable communication protocols that ensure high performance under energy constraints. These sectors demand both reliable data delivery and high throughput to support real-time operations, making the balance between these metrics crucial, particularly when devices operate at varying distances. This article provides valuable insights for selecting reliable transport protocols in IoT deployments, especially in scenarios where trade-offs between reliability, throughput, and energy consumption must be carefully managed. We examine the performance impact of distance on the Simple Automatic ReQuest (SARQ) protocol compared to traditional UDP and TCP in IoT environments. Through experimental analysis across varying distances, we evaluated three key performance metrics: throughput, reliability (packet delivery ratio), and energy consumption. Our findings show that distance significantly affects performance, even in short ranges. UDP experiences about 20% decline in throughput and packet delivery ratio as distance increases from 10 to 50 meters, while SARQ maintains consistent performance, demonstrating its robustness to distance-related challenge, and TCP maintains high reliability (100%) but suffers from lower throughput and higher energy consumption, even for short distances. In terms of energy efficiency, SARQ’s consumption lies between UDP’s minimal requirements and TCP’s higher consumption. These characteristics make SARQ particularly suitable for IoT applications requiring balanced performance, offering a practical solution that combines reliable communication with reasonable throughput and energy efficiency.