International Journal of Wireless and Ad Hoc Communication IJWAC 2692-4056 10.54216/IJWAC https://www.americaspg.com/journals/show/4298 2019 2019 PhD, Department of Electronic Engineering and Communication Technology, Modern Academy for Engineering and Technology, Cairo, Egypt Eman Eman 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. 2026 2026 01 14 10.54216/IJWAC.100101 https://www.americaspg.com/articleinfo/20/show/4298