Light-weight streaming protocol for the Internet of Multimedia Things: Voice streaming over NB-IoT

Despite the significant potential of the Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT), the integration of multimedia services and devices into the Internet of Things (IoT) still stays a challenge due to the limited capabilities of IoT devices and distinct characteristics of multimedia applications. In this paper, we investigate a novel, efficient and light-weight streaming protocol for IoMT to enable numerous multimedia-based IoT applications and services. Further, the use of standardized IoT architectures, interaction and information models will provide syntactic, structural and semantic interoperability for IoMT which will permit heterogeneous multimedia things to communicate and interact with each other and with other connected things seamlessly. Additionally, we also validate the proposed design by means of a real-life use case and implementation, which targets the ability of end-to-end bidirectional voice communication over NB-IoT technology, a long-range limited bit rate communication technology. Also, we assess the suitability of NB-IoT for handling less-demanding IoT multimedia applications by means of theoretical calculations and practical experiments. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.