Comment by mlhpdx

WireGuard doesn’t add noticeable battery drain in my experience. I have a fleet of Xiao ESP32-C3 devices with DS1820 temperature sensors that run on batteries and send samples over WireGuard.

The battery drain is 100% a function of the transmit time, so by pre-encrypting the buffers before powering on the radio I save a bit. Likewise for the response handshake - get the packet, shut down the radio, then decrypt it.

When sending samples between handshakes, I don’t have to wait for an ACK of any kind - I just send the packet and shut down the radio. That saves a ton of power compared to TCP.