The Internet of Things has become a foundational paradigm in contemporary digital transformation, enabling large-scale interconnection between physical objects and cyber systems across domains such as smart cities, healthcare, industrial automation, energy systems, and environmental monitoring. At the core of IoT functionality lie communication and messaging protocols that govern data exchange among heterogeneous, resource-constrained, and often energy-limited devices. The selection and integration of these protocols have profound implications for system performance, scalability, energy efficiency, security, and long-term sustainability. Despite extensive research, the existing literature remains fragmented across protocol-specific studies, high-level surveys, industry adoption reports, and emerging discussions on energy-aware and secure IoT systems. This article presents a comprehensive, publication-ready research synthesis strictly grounded in established academic references and authoritative industry sources. Through extensive theoretical elaboration and comparative analysis, the study examines enabling technologies, application-layer messaging protocols, protocol overhead, energy consumption characteristics, security challenges, and sustainability considerations in IoT architectures. The methodology is qualitative and analytical, emphasizing cross-study synthesis rather than experimental benchmarking. The findings demonstrate that no single protocol optimally satisfies all IoT requirements; instead, protocol suitability is determined by application context, device constraints, network topology, and security needs. The discussion highlights persistent trade-offs, methodological limitations in existing studies, and the growing importance of energy-aware and secure design principles. The article concludes by outlining future research directions focused on unified evaluation frameworks, adaptive protocol stacks, and sustainable IoT system design.

Internet of Things, communication protocols, MQTT, CoAP

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