You can choose the transport protocol to use for transferring data.
The protocols differ in terms of their properties and the overhead associated with sending data over the air. This affects both the power consumption of your device and the data costs on the cellular network.
| Option | Advantages | Disadvantages |
|---|---|---|
| TCP/IP | Data retransmissions Congestion control In-order delivery Error detection |
Slow handshake Larger overhead Repetition if data is not received Not suited for NB-IoT |
| UDP/IP | No handshake needed Better suited for low-power devices |
Not guaranteed delivery Not all major cloud vendors support UDP yet |
| NIDD | Removes the IP overhead Network optimized |
Not many networks support it Only supported on NB-IoT Not many cloud vendors support it |
Compared to TCP/IP, UDP/IP is better suited for low-power devices because of the difference in overhead and the handshake part is not needed. Based on your specific use case of application it is good to know which route you should take. For example, consider if data should be acknowledged at the destination or is power consumption more important.
In NIDD, the IP protocol is not used as a transport layer which removes big parts of the overhead. NIDD is the most power efficient protocol, but has major disadvantages presented in the table above.