The Internet of Things (IoT) is a large-scale network of devices capable of sensing, data processing, and communicating with each other through different communication protocols. In today's technology ecosystem, IoT interacts with many application areas such as smart city, smart building, security, traffic, remote monitoring, health, energy, disaster, agriculture, industry. The IoT network in these scenarios comprises tiny devices, gateways, and cloud platforms. An IoT network is able to keep these fundamental components in transmission under many conditions with lightweight communication protocols taking into account the limited hardware features (memory, processor, energy, etc.) of tiny devices. These lightweight communication protocols affect the network traffic, reliability, bandwidth, and energy consumption of the IoT application. Therefore, determining the most proper communication protocol for application developers emerges as an important engineering problem. This paper presents a straightforward overview of the lightweight communication protocols, technological advancements in application layer for the IoT ecosystem. The survey then analyzes various recent lightweight communication protocols and reviews their strengths and limitations. In addition, the paper explains the experimental comparison of Constrained Applications Protocol (CoAP), Message Queuing Telemetry (MQTT), and WebSocket protocols, more convenient for tiny IoT devices. Finally, we discuss future research directions of communication protocols for IoT.