Hi everyone,
I am working on a project that I would like to send and receive data between a microcontroller and a PC. If I send one single data point (4 bytes) in stead of a big packet over a wireless medium, which medium provides me the smallest data transmission overhead? Knowing this might help me select the right wireless communication platform for my system.
For example, I am trying to send a sampled data (4 bytes each) at the rate of x Hz from a microcontroller to PC and from PC to the microcontroller. I would like to have my PC to be part of my real-time (50Hz with lowest latency) control loop. Theoretically, Which one among WIFI, Bluetooth, and Zigbee has the highest possible x Hz and lowest latency (These two are probably related)?
In Wifi, I know that TCP/IP has very high throughput compared to Bluetooth or Zigbee, and it is due to the ability to send big packets at certain rate. However, I would like to send very small packet at very fast rate (overhead problem). I also know that UDP allows me to send small packets at faster rates than TCP/IP but it does not care about the packets loss. This is ideally what I want, since I only care about a single data sending at the fastest rate possible. However, I am not sure how UDP is compared with Bluetooth and Zigbee. What about any other wireless protocols out there?
I was not able to find much information regarding this particular project, since most comparisons are about throughput and latency, which most likely depends on packet size, distance, how many devices are currently connected, etc.