Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in IoT

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Why is TCP often preferred in critical IoT applications?

TCP ensures reliable, ordered, and error-checked data delivery, which is essential for IoT use cases like industrial automation, healthcare monitoring, and financial transactions. Its features, such as retransmission of lost packets, congestion control, and sequence numbering, make it indispensable for applications where data integrity is non-negotiable.

How does TCP manage congestion and flow control in IoT networks?

TCP employs dynamic window sizing and congestion management techniques like Slow Start, Congestion Avoidance, Fast Retransmit, and Fast Recovery. These mechanisms adapt the rate of data flow based on network conditions, ensuring efficient use of bandwidth while avoiding overloading resource-constrained IoT devices.

What challenges does TCP introduce in resource-constrained IoT environments?

While TCP offers reliability, its connection-oriented nature and features like acknowledgment and retransmission introduce overhead. For IoT devices with limited processing power and battery life, this can result in increased energy consumption and reduced network efficiency, making TCP unsuitable for real-time or low-power applications.

When should engineers consider alternatives like UDP MQTT, or CoAP for IoT?

Alternatives to TCP are preferred when: Low latency is critical (e.g., real-time gaming, live streaming). Power efficiency is required (e.g., battery-operated IoT sensors). Applications tolerate occasional packet loss or require reduced overhead. Protocols like UDP with custom reliability layers, CoAP, or MQTT offer up to 95% bandwidth efficiency, making them ideal for these scenarios.

How does TCP differ from IP in the context of communication?

TCP operates at the Transport Layer (Layer 4) and ensures reliable, connection-oriented communication with error checking and flow control. In contrast, IP functions at the Network Layer (Layer 3) and is responsible for addressing and routing packets across networks. TCP provides reliability, while IP delivers scalability through features like IPv6, which supports billions of IoT devices with unique addresses.