With the resource constraints of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, performance and energy efficiency have become an important IoT software design consideration while minimizing resource usages. To provide efficient communication for resource-constrained applications, several IoT protocols have been introduced, and yet there are few existing guidelines to help the programmer choose an appropriate communication protocol. To address this limitation, we evaluate five different communication protocols including CoAP, MQTT, MQTT-SN, WebSocket, and TCP. Our result can help IoT application programmers make informed decision when choosing communication protocols for their applications.