The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has changed the industries of smart cities, healthcare, and industrial automation, and now billions of devices can be connected. Nevertheless, it has been a major challenge that has in recent years been critical in achieving energy efficiency as well as guaranteeing dependable communication over re-source constrained networks. Though extensive protocol-level solutions have been proposed, there is minimal research which answers the question of providing a holistic view of their evolution, global trends across the globe and their impacts. To address this gap, the present study conducts a scientometric review of the literature in publication on IoT communication protocols in 2016–2025 with reference to energy-saving and reliable solutions. In Scopus, 290 articles were searched, and analyzed according to the bibliometric indicators, network of keyword co-occurrence and visualization software to map the research, collaboration and thematic trends. Findings indicate excellent growth of 38.29 annually, with India as the most prominent source of publication almost half of the publications, and IEEE Access and IEEE Internet of Things Journal as the most efficient sources. The themes that have been found to be significant in the research include adaptive power control, clustering strategies, hybrid routing, and AI-based optimization methods trade-off energy saving and robust performance. The presented results demonstrate the importance of integrating energy considerate designs with safety- and fault-tolerant systems to form scalable and sustainable IoT systems able to meet the requirements of the applications of the next generation.