Interoperability and Data Storage in Internet of Multimedia Things: Investigating Current Trends, Research Challenges and Future Directions

Internet of Things (IoT) has widely been accepted as a promising paradigm for connecting a large number of resource-constrained miniature sensor nodes that have the ability to sense the deployed environment. They have found their applications in various aspect of our daily lives. However, these nodes are mostly restricted to sense only the scalar data. Nowadays, multimedia sensor nodes are gaining significant attention due to their ability to collect scalar as well as multi-dimensional data. These nodes are considered as the foundation of Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) and are shaping the perception of IoT. Multimedia data have stringent requirements in terms of reliability, latency, storage, bandwidth, and Quality of Service (QoS). To provide seamless and interoperable communication in IoMT, the underlying protocol stacks need to fulfill these stringent requirements. However, the heterogeneous nature of multimedia sensors makes interoperability a challenging task to fulfill. To understand the challenges faced by seamless and interoperable communication in IoMT, we provide a comprehensive review of the existing protocol stacks of IoMT and analyze their feasibility for multimedia streaming applications. Data storage of multimedia applications is another area that requires immediate attention of the research community. For this purpose, we study cloud as an entity to facilitate multimedia applications of IoMT. The instances of multimedia cloud are analyzed and a number of shortcomings are identified that pave the way for edge computing in IoMT. Finally, we present a case study that shows the significance of our work. The case study portrays an in-home patient monitoring system with an interoperable communication among the connected multimedia streaming devices at home, and healthcare practitioners at hospital. The case study also highlights the importance of uninterrupted data storage and retrieval at the network edge and multimedia sensor nodes.