Low-Cost Wi-Fi Connectivity for IoT: An Analysis of the ESP8266 Platform

The ESP8266 was launched by Espressif Systems in 2014 and is a low-priced Wi-Fi microchip that has a microcontroller and a complete TCP/IP stack.The ESP8266 disrupted the IoT market in that it allowed the development of inexpensive, small, and low-power wireless applications.This paper describes the ESP8266 architecture, power modes, and software support (Arduino, NodeMCU, MicroPython), in addition to security features such as WPA2 and SSL/TLS.A comparison to the ESP32 shows trade-offs in performance and power.While there are newer options, the ESP8266 is still actively adopted in education, prototypes, and ultra-lowcost IoT applications.