February 20, 2016

Internet and Multimedia

Internet of Things (IoT) systems cannot successfully realize the notion of ubiquitous connectivity of everything if they are not capable to truly include ‘multimedia things’. However, the current research and development activities in the field do not mandate the features of multimedia objects, thus leaving a gap to benefit from multimedia content based services and applications. In this paper, we analyze this issue by contemplating the concept of IoT and drawing an inspiration towards the perspective vision of ‘Internet of Multimedia Things’ (IoMT). Therein, we introduce IoMT as a novel paradigm in which smart heterogeneous multimedia things can interact and cooperate with one another and with other things connected to the Internet to facilitate multimedia based services and applications that are globally available to the users. Some applications and use-cases for IoMT are presented to reflect the possibilities enabled by this new paradigm. An IoMT architecture is then presented which is segregated into four distinct stages; (i) multimedia sensing, (ii) reporting and addressability, (iii) multimedia-aware cloud, and (iv) multi-agent systems. Instead of proposing specific technical solutions for each individual stage of the presented architecture, we survey the already existing technologies, providing a synthesis for the realization of the vision of IoMT. Subsequently, various requirements and challenges as well as the feasibility of existing solutions for each stage of proposed IoMT architecture are comprehensively discussed.

Keywords

Internet of things;
Internet of multimedia things;
Wireless communication;
Architecture;
Multimedia processing

Sheeraz Akhtar Alvi is a Research Officer at KICS, an institute of the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore. Before joining KICS he worked as a Research Assistant in National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad. He holds a BS degree in Electronics Engineering from the International Islamic University, Islamabad (IIUI) and a MS degree in Electrical Engineering from the NUST, Islamabad. He has served as a reviewer for many prestigious journals and conferences. His current research interests are in Internet of Things, multimedia communication and wireless networks. He is a member of IEEE.

Bilal Afzal is a graduate from National University of Science and Technology (NUST) Islamabad, Pakistan. He worked as research associate at NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences for one year. Currently he is Research Officer at Al-Khawarizmi Institute of Computer Sciences, UET Lahore. His research interest includes Computer and Wireless Networks, 4G communication technologies and Next Generation Networks. He is a member of program committee for IEEE ICOSST-2014 conference and a registered member of Pakistan Engineering Council.

Ghalib A. Shah [M’09] received his Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from Middle East Technical University, Turkey in 2007. He is currently an associate professor at Al-Khawarizmi Institute of Computer Science, UET Lahore and leading the Emerging Networks (ENet) Lab. He has been awarded many research grants by national and international funding organizations. He is a regular technical committee member of many reputed international conferences and reviewer of various high impact factor journals. His research interests include the design and analysis of communication protocols from MAC to Transport layer for cognitive radio networks, wireless multimedia networks and Internet of things.

Luigi Atzori is senior researcher at the University of Cagliari (Italy). His main research topics of interest are in service management in next generation networks, with particular attention to architectural solutions for the Internet of Things, QoS, service-oriented networking, bandwidth management and multimedia networking. He has published more than 100 journal articles and refereed conference papers. Dr. Atzori has received the Telecom Italia award for an outstanding M.Sc. thesis in Telecommunication and has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship (11/20) to work on video streaming at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Arizona. He is senior member of IEEE, co-chair of the IEEE Multimedia Communications Committee (MMTC). He has been the editor for the ACM/Springer Wireless Networks Journal and guest editor for the IEEE Communications Magazine, Monet and Signal Processing: Image Communications journals. He is currently editor of the IEEE IoT Journal.

Waqar Mahmood did his Bachelor’s from University of Engineering and Technology Lahore in 1989, Masters and PhD from Georgia Tech USA in 1992 and 1996, respectively all in Electrical Engineering. He has served in industry as well as academia in the North America and Pakistan. He served as Director Process Development in CIENA Corporation, Maryland; He was selected as voting member and US delegate to the IEC committee on optical interconnect standardization. He is currently the Director of Al-Khwarizmi Institute of Computer Science (KICS), a research center in UET Lahore. He has also served as faculty member in National University of Science and Technology, Islamabad prior to joining KICS. His research interests include optical communications, process technology development, discrete event systems, Networking systems, wireless systems, energy optimization, power systems and renewable energy.