IoT Protocol Range & Power Tradeoff Simulator

Uplink Protocol

Distance to gateway 30 m

Sampling interval 10 s

Link status

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Latency / packet

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Battery life

–

Link utilisation

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How it works

Each uplink protocol trades range for bandwidth and transmit power. A packet's latency is the fixed protocol overhead plus the time to push its payload through the available bandwidth. Energy per packet is transmit power times that transmit time, and battery life falls out of how many packets are sent per day. Edge filtering shrinks the payload from a raw sample block to a small summary before it ever leaves the device, cutting transmit time (and therefore energy) directly — the same "process near the source" idea used by real gateways and edge nodes.

t_air = payload_bits / bandwidth
latency = t_overhead + t_air
energy/packet = txPower · t_air
battery_days = capacity / (energy/packet · packets_per_day)
link OK  ⇔  distance ≤ range

Distance to gateway — beyond a protocol's range the link drops packets; near the edge of range, drops become intermittent.
Sampling interval — how often the sensor transmits; shorter intervals mean more packets/day and faster battery drain.
Edge filtering — summarising data on-device before transmission instead of sending the raw block, shrinking payload size.
Protocol — Wi-Fi (short range, huge bandwidth, power-hungry), BLE (short range, low power), LoRaWAN (very long range, tiny bandwidth, low power), NB-IoT (cellular-wide range, modest bandwidth, moderate power).

Real-world relevance: this is the exact tradeoff an IoT engineer makes when picking a radio for a battery-powered sensor — the "best" protocol depends entirely on how far the data has to travel and how often it needs to move.

Sensor node Gateway Packet delivered Packet dropped