Energy Consumption Analysis of Application Layer Protocols in Realistic IoT Uplink Scenarios An Empirical Study on an ESP32 Microcontroller

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled applications ranging from consumer devices to industrial systems. Yet the success of these deployments depends on hardware and software design choices made under tight resource and energy constraints. This paper assesses the energy consumption of application-layer protocols in representative IoT uplink scenarios. We built a measurement-driven testbed with an ESP32 as the sender, an INA226 for power sensing, and an Arduino Pro Micro for data logging. Using two scenario-inspired benchmarks, we evaluated four communication protocols. The results provide practical guidance for constraint-driven design: at low uplink rates, protocol choice is largely dictated by deployment requirements, as energy differences are rarely practically significant; at higher rates, protocols can materially affect energy consumption.