Energy Usage of UDP and DCCP over 802.11n

We show that the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) provides ~10% - ~40% greater energy efficiency than the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) in a wireless LAN (WLAN) client. Our empirical evaluation uses a test bed comprised of consumer components and open source software to measure typical performance that can be expected by a user, rather than highly-tuned performance which most users will not be able to configure. We focus our measurements on a scenario using IEEE 802.11n at 5GHz as energy efficiency will be particularly important to mobile and wireless users. We consider overall performance as well as the energy efficiency of the protocol usage to give a rounded comparison of UDP and DCCP. Overall, we see there would be great benefit in many applications using DCCP instead of UDP.