Power analysis of local transmission technologies

With the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices expected to explode to over 20 Billion devices by 2020, it is vital that efficient communication technologies are used. While ideally a single technology would emerge to simplify deployment, in practice the varying power and bandwidth requirements of different devices has led to an industry split over communication technologies, and while a number of new technologies have been designed with IoT in mind, commercial imperatives have meant that existing wireless protocols, in particular Wi-Fi and 433 MHz AM, remain the most prevelent. This article outlines the power usage of these two most common protocols, and considers power aspects of using each protocol in an IoT setting with experiments carried out with real world devices used in current products