A Hybrid-based 3D Streaming Framework for Mobile Devices over IoT Environments

Today, we are witnessing the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), where trillions of objects are interconnected and starting to re-define the design of the Internet and its services. In fact, IoT plays a prominent role in the realization of the smart city paradigm. One of the highly demanded services in a smart city infrastructure is to enable Networked Virtual Environment (NVE) class of applications, like collaborative Augmented Reality (AR), virtual walkthroughs, and Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOGs), on mobile things. Perversely, pre-downloading and rendering a complex 3D graphics is very computationally intensive and neither commensurate with the current mobiles hardware specifications and their dynamic mobility natures nor with the available wireless bandwidth. In addition, most IoT environments are generally deployed via a service-centric architecture which obviously suffers from a single point of failure, service latency, and scalability issues between IoT gateways and mobile devices. In order to address these problems, a framework that combines the pros of both central and distributed based schemes has been proposed. The proposed hybrid framework, referred to as STREAMIT, facilitates the 3D texture streaming over thin devices to cope with the mobile hardware resources and alleviate the challenges of client-server and ad-hoc 3D streaming. In addition, STREAMIT implements adaptive strategies to select, prioritize, and convey 3D texture graphical objects that only contribute to the user's visible scene. STREAMIT has been evaluated using NS3 discrete network simulator where extensive experiments have confirmed big achievements in terms of resource utilization, latency, throughput, and overhead.