Question

For messaging between highly constrained IoT sensors, which protocol is specifically designed to run over UDP to maintain low overhead compared to TCP-based protocols?

Accepted Answer

The protocol specifically designed for messaging between highly constrained IoT sensors over UDP is CoAP, which stands for Constrained Application Protocol. CoAP is a web transfer protocol that functions similarly to HTTP but is optimized for devices with limited memory, power, and processing capabilities. While standard HTTP relies on the Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, which requires a complex multi-step handshake and continuous connection management to ensure data arrives in perfect order, CoAP uses the User Datagram Protocol, or UDP. UDP is a connectionless transport protocol that simply sends packets without verifying the connection first, which significantly reduces the amount of data overhead required to transmit a message. Because IoT sensors often transmit small, infrequent pieces of data like temperature readings, the heavy overhead of TCP is unnecessary. CoAP provides a lightweight request-response model that allows these tiny devices to communicate efficiently over constrained networks, making it the standard choice for low-power, wide-area IoT applications.

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For messaging between highly constrained IoT sensors, which protocol is specifically designed to run over UDP to maintain low overhead compared to TCP-based protocols?