Statistical Performance Evaluation of UDP Communication in IoT Environments: A Comparative Study of Small-Scale vs Large-Scale Packet Transmission under Latency Variations

Eman Gaber^1,*

¹PhD, Department of Electronic Engineering and Communication Technology, Modern Academy for Engineering and Technology, Cairo, Egypt

Email: lady_eman_g@yahoo.com

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT), reliable and efficient data transmission has become a critical requirement for large-scale heterogeneous deployments. This paper presents a comprehensive simulation-based performance analysis of three widely adopted IoT transport protocols—UDP, CoAP, and MQTT—under Rayleigh fading channel conditions using a MATLAB-based framework. The study evaluates the transmission of 100 and 1000 data packets under three distinct latency regimes: low, medium, and high. Key performance metrics include end-to-end delay, jitter, packet loss ratio, and throughput. A novel Adaptive Exponential Moving Average (EMA) jitter buffer algorithm is proposed, achieving 57–65% jitter reduction across all tested scenarios. Protocol comparison reveals that UDP achieves the lowest average delay (20 ms under low conditions), while MQTT incurs the highest overhead (+20 ms) due to broker relay. Monte Carlo statistical analysis with 500 simulation runs confirms result convergence within 0.5 ms between 100-packet and 1000-packet scales. The findings provide practical design guidelines for IoT protocol selection and establish a reproducible benchmark for evaluating transport-layer behavior in constrained wireless ad hoc networks.

Keywords: UDP; CoAP; MQTT; Internet of Things; Latency; Jitter; Rayleigh fading; Quality of Service (QoS); Network simulation; Adaptive jitter buffer; MATLAB benchmarking; Ad hoc networks; 6LoWPAN