Energy Efficiency-Driven Selection of Wireless Communication Stacks for Industrial Retrofitting Applications

The digital integration of existing industrial equipment (retrofitting) is a central element of the Industry 4.0 paradigm, wherein the energy efficiency of Internet of Things (IoT) gateways is a decisive design consideration. This research aims to experimentally compare various wireless and wired communication protocols—ESP-NOW, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Bluetooth Classic (Serial Port Profile, SPP), Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), and S7 Protocol—within a legacy Programmable Logic Controller (PLC)-based environment. A dedicated testbed was developed using Siemens S7-300 PLCs and ESP32-based gateway devices to ensure measurement reproducibility. Energy consumption was determined using a high-precision power profiler with payloads ranging from 50 to 15,000 bytes, applying the trapezoidal rule while considering both active transaction and standby states. The specific energy consumption metric (μJ/byte) introduced in this study highlights the distinct scaling limitations of the protocols. While ESP-NOW proved highly efficient for small telemetry packets, Bluetooth Classic exhibited superior scalability for bulk data volumes. Furthermore, a critical energetic crossover point was identified for ESP-NOW due to hardware fragmentation limits, whereas MQTT demonstrated massive energetic overhead for small payloads. Standby measurements confirmed that the continuous baseline consumption of the wired Ethernet interface significantly dominates the energy budget compared to wireless alternatives. These empirical findings are synthesized into a formal Qualitative Decision Matrix to help engineers optimize protocol selection based on the expected duty cycle, facilitating the development of sustainable industrial digitalization solutions.