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Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT): Opportunities, Challenges and Solutions

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A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Internet of Things".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 January 2020) | Viewed by 22728

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Prof. Dr. Yousaf Bin Zikria

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Guest Editor

Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan, Korea
Interests: IoT, 5G, wireless communications and networks, opportunistic communications, wireless sensor networks, routing protocols, cognitive radio ad hoc networks
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Prof. Dr. Muhammad Khalil Afzal

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Guest Editor

COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, GT Road, Wah Cantt, Pakistan
Interests: wireless sensor networks; ad hoc networks; Smart Cities; 5G; IoT
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Prof. Dr. Sung Won Kim

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan-si 38541, Republic of Korea
Interests: resource management; wireless networks; mobile networks; performance evaluation; embedded systems; machine learning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Internet of Things (IoT) characteristics support multimedia communications; however, multimedia applications are bandwidth-hungry and delay-sensitive. The rapid growth of multimedia traffic in IoT has led the way to innovating new techniques to meet its requirements. Internet of multimedia things (IoMT) devices require higher bandwidth, bigger memory, and faster computational resources to process data. Typical communications include multipoint-to-point and multipoint-to-multipoint scenarios. Real-world multimedia applications include emergency response systems, traffic monitoring, crime inspection, smart cities, smart homes, smart hospitals, smart agriculture, surveillance systems, Internet of bodies (IoB), and Industrial IoT (IIoT). Dynamic networks, heterogeneous devices and data, strict Quality of Service (QoS), and delay sensitivity and reliability requirements over resource-constrained IoMT pose humongous challenges for multimedia communication in IoT.

This Special Issue aims to bring together academia and industrial researchers to explore opportunities for IoMT, study its impact on the solution of the aforementioned challenges, and propose viable solutions. We solicit papers covering various topics of interest that include but are not limited to the following:

IoMT architectures and technologies
IoMT Applications
IoMT communications and computing
IoMT Big Data analytics
Energy-critical IoMT
IoMT routing protocols
IoMT MAC protocols
Machine Learning for IoMT
IoMT security
SDN-based IoMT solutions
Cross-layer protocols for IoMT
Use cases for IoMTs

Prof. Yousaf Bin Zikria
Prof. Muhammad Khalil Afzal
Prof. Sung Won Kim
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

22 pages, 1895 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Multi-Cell LTE-U/Wi-Fi Coexistence Evaluation Using a Reinforcement Learning Framework

by José M. de C. Neto, Sildolfo F. G. Neto, Pedro M. de Santana and Vicente A. de Sousa, Jr.

Sensors 2020, 20(7), 1855; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20071855 - 27 Mar 2020

Cited by 17 | Viewed by 3124

Abstract

Cellular broadband Internet of Things (IoT) applications are expected to keep growing year-by-year, generating demands from high throughput services. Since some of these applications are deployed over licensed mobile networks, as long term evolution (LTE), one already common problem is faced: the scarcity of licensed spectrum to cope with the increasing demand for data rate. The LTE-Unlicensed (LTE-U) forum, aiming to tackle this problem, proposed LTE-U to operate in the 5 GHz unlicensed spectrum. However, Wi-Fi is already the consolidated technology operating in this portion of the spectrum, besides the fact that new technologies for unlicensed band need mechanisms to promote fair coexistence with the legacy ones. In this work, we extend the literature by analyzing a multi-cell LTE-U/Wi-Fi coexistence scenario, with a high interference profile and data rates targeting a cellular broadband IoT deployment. Then, we propose a centralized, coordinated reinforcement learning framework to improve LTE-U/Wi-Fi aggregate data rates. The added value of the proposed solution is assessed by a ns-3 simulator, showing improvements not only in the overall system data rate but also in average user data rate, even with the high interference of a multi-cell environment. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT): Opportunities, Challenges and Solutions)

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15 pages, 2599 KiB

Open AccessArticle

An Efficient Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) Policy Retrieval Method Based on Attribute and Value Levels in Multimedia Networks

by Meiping Liu, Cheng Yang, Hao Li and Yana Zhang

Sensors 2020, 20(6), 1741; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20061741 - 20 Mar 2020

Cited by 18 | Viewed by 3447

Abstract

Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) brings convenient and intelligent services while also bringing huge challenges to multimedia data security and privacy. Access control is used to protect the confidentiality and integrity of restricted resources. Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) implements fine-grained control of resources in an open heterogeneous IoMT environment. However, due to numerous users and policies in ABAC, access control policy evaluation is inefficient, which affects the quality of multimedia application services in the Internet of Things (IoT). This paper proposed an efficient policy retrieval method to improve the performance of access control policy evaluation in multimedia networks. First, retrieve policies that satisfy the request at the attribute level by computing based on the binary identifier. Then, at the attribute value level, the depth index was introduced to reconstruct the policy decision tree, thereby improving policy retrieval efficiency. This study carried out simulation experiments in terms of the different number of policies and different policy complexity situation. The results showed that the proposed method was three to five times more efficient in access control policy evaluation and had stronger scalability. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT): Opportunities, Challenges and Solutions)

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16 pages, 1764 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Monitoring Movements of Ataxia Patient by Using UWB Technology

by Tanjila Akter Zilani, Fadi Al-Turjman, Muhammad Bilal Khan, Nan Zhao and Xiaodong Yang

Sensors 2020, 20(3), 931; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20030931 - 10 Feb 2020

Cited by 18 | Viewed by 3783

Abstract

Internet of multimedia things (IoMT) driving innovative product development in health care applications. IoMT requires delay-sensitive and higher bandwidth devices. Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is a promising solution to improve communication between devices, tracking and monitoring of patients. In the future, this technology has the capability to expand the IoMT world with new capabilities and more devices can be integrated. At the present time, some people face different types of physiological problems because of the damage in different areas of the central nervous system. Thus, they lose their balance coordination. One of these types of coordination problems is named Ataxia, in which patients are unable to control their body movements. This kind of coordination disorder needs a proper supervision system for the caretaker. Previous Ataxia assessment methods are cumbersome and cannot handle regular monitoring and tracking of patients. One of the most challenging tasks is to detect different walking abnormalities of Ataxia patients. In our paper, we present a technique for monitoring and tracking of a patient with the help of UWB technology. This method expands the real-time location systems (RTLS) in the indoor environment by placing wearable receiving tags on the body of Ataxia patients. The location and four different walking movement data are collected by UWB transceiver for the classification and prediction in the two-dimensional path. For accurate classification, we use a support vector machine (SVM) algorithm to clarify the movement variations. Our proposed examined result successfully achieved and the accuracy is above 95%. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT): Opportunities, Challenges and Solutions)

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36 pages, 5086 KiB

Open AccessArticle

QoSRP: A Cross-Layer QoS Channel-Aware Routing Protocol for the Internet of Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

by Muhammad Faheem, Rizwan Aslam Butt, Basit Raza, Hani Alquhayz, Muhammad Waqar Ashraf, Syed Bilal Shah, Md Asri Ngadi and Vehbi Cagri Gungor

Sensors 2019, 19(21), 4762; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19214762 - 02 Nov 2019

Cited by 30 | Viewed by 3964

Abstract

Quality of service (QoS)-aware data gathering in static-channel based underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) is severely limited due to location and time-dependent acoustic channel communication characteristics. This paper proposes a novel cross-layer QoS-aware multichannel routing protocol called QoSRP for the internet of UWSNs-based time-critical marine monitoring applications. The proposed QoSRP scheme considers the unique characteristics of the acoustic communication in highly dynamic network topology during gathering and relaying events data towards the sink. The proposed QoSRP scheme during the time-critical events data-gathering process employs three basic mechanisms, namely underwater channel detection (UWCD), underwater channel assignment (UWCA) and underwater packets forwarding (UWPF). The UWCD mechanism finds the vacant channels with a high probability of detection and low probability of missed detection and false alarms. The UWCA scheme assigns high data rates channels to acoustic sensor nodes (ASNs) with longer idle probability in a robust manner. Lastly, the UWPF mechanism during conveying information avoids congestion, data path loops and balances the data traffic load in UWSNs. The QoSRP scheme is validated through extensive simulations conducted by NS2 and AquaSim 2.0 in underwater environments (UWEs). The simulation results reveal that the QoSRP protocol performs better compared to existing routing schemes in UWSNs. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT): Opportunities, Challenges and Solutions)

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18 pages, 2062 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Hash-Based RFID Authentication Mechanism for Context-Aware Management in IoT-Based Multimedia Systems

by Deebak B D, Fadi Al-Turjman and Leonardo Mostarda

Sensors 2019, 19(18), 3821; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19183821 - 04 Sep 2019

Cited by 17 | Viewed by 4001

Abstract

With the technological advances in the areas of Machine-To-Machine (M2M) and Device-To-Device (D2D) communication, various smart computing devices now integrate a set of multimedia sensors such as accelerometers, barometers, cameras, fingerprint sensors, gestures, iris scanners, etc., to infer the environmental status. These devices are generally identified using radio-frequency identification (RFID) to transfer the collected data to other local or remote objects over a geographical location. To enable automatic data collection and transition, a valid RFID embedded object is highly recommended. It is used to authorize the devices at various communication phases. In smart application devices, RFID-based authentication is enabled to provide short-range operation. On the other hand, it does not require the communication device to be in line-of-sight to gain server access like bar-code systems. However, in existing authentication schemes, an adversary may capture private user data to create a forgery problem. Also, another issue is the high computation cost. Thus, several studies have addressed the usage of context-aware authentication schemes for multimedia device management systems. The security objective is to determine the user authenticity in order to withhold the eavesdropping and tracing. Lately, RFID has played a significant for the context-aware sensor management systems (CASMS) as it can reduce the complexity of the sensor systems, it can be available in access control, sensor monitoring, real time inventory and security-aware management systems. Lately, this technology has opened up its wings for CASMS, where the challenging issues are tag-anonymity, mutual authentication and untraceability. Thus, this paper proposes a secure hash-based RFID mechanism for CASMS. This proposed protocol is based on the hash operation with the synchronized secret session-key to withstand any attacks, such as desynchronization, replay and man-in-the-middle. Importantly, the security and performance analysis proves that the proposed hash-based protocol achieves better security and performance efficiencies than other related schemes. From the simulation results, it is observed that the proposed scheme is secure, robust and less expensive while achieving better communication metrics such as packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and throughput rate. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT): Opportunities, Challenges and Solutions)

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16 pages, 3043 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Q-Learning Based Fair and Efficient Coexistence of LTE in Unlicensed Band

by Rojeena Bajracharya, Rakesh Shrestha and Sung Won Kim

Sensors 2019, 19(13), 2875; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19132875 - 28 Jun 2019

Cited by 21 | Viewed by 3203

Abstract

The increased demand for spectrum resources for multimedia communications and a limited licensed spectrum have led to widespread concern regarding the operation of long term evolution (LTE) in the unlicensed (LTE-U) band for internet of things (IoT) systems. Because Wi-Fi and LTE are diverse with dissimilar physical and link layer configurations, several solutions to achieve an efficient and fair coexistence have been proposed. Most of the proposed solutions facilitate a fair coexistence through a discontinuous transmission using a duty cycling or contention mechanism and an efficient coexistence through a clean channel selection. However, they are constrained only by fairness or efficient coexistence but not both. Herein, we propose joint adaptive duty cycling (ADC) and dynamic channel switch (DCS) mechanisms. The ADC mechanism supports a fair channel access opportunity by muting certain numbers of subframes for Wi-Fi users whereas the DCS mechanism offers more access opportunities for LTE-U and Wi-Fi users by preventing LTE-U users from occupying a crowded channel for a longer time. To support these mechanisms in a dynamic environment, LTE-U for IoT applications is enhanced using Q-learning techniques for an automatic selection of the appropriate combination of muting period and channel. Simulation results show the fair and efficient coexistence achieved from using the proposed mechanism. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT): Opportunities, Challenges and Solutions)

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