Enabling Internet of Media Things With Edge-Based Virtual Multimedia Sensors

Multimedia sensors have recently become a significant data source in the Internet of Things (IoT), giving rise to the Internet of Media Things (IoMT). Since multimedia applications are usually latency-sensitive, data processing in the cloud is not always suitable. A strategy to minimize delay is processing multimedia streams closer to data sources, exploiting resources at the network edge. Moreover, virtualization is widely used to reduce complexity arising from heterogeneity in IoT environments. In this paper, we propose an edge-based architecture and platform to manage virtual multimedia sensors (VMS), enabling IoMT applications to be easily deployed. Our proposal encompasses V-PRISM, a software architecture tailored for IoMT, and ALFA, a distributed implementation of the architecture. V-PRISM components were designed to be deployed and executed in multiple edge nodes. VMSs are in charge of processing multimedia streams and provide an abstraction layer between IoMT applications and physical devices that produce those streams. This paper describes the proposal and the results of experiments showing that the proposed approach can successfully perform multimedia stream processing for applications that requires low-latency.