Energy efficient green routing protocol for Internet of Multimedia Things

Internet of Things (IoT) envisions the notion of ubiquitous connectivity of `everything´. However, the current research and development activities have been restricted to scalar sensor data based IoT systems, thus leaving a gap to benefit from services and application enabled by `multimedia things´ or Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT). Moreover, a crucial issue for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) community is the steer increase in CO₂ emissions, which mandates green communication to reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint emissions. Recently, IETF ROLL working group standardized an IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) for resource constrained devices. RPL builds a tree-like network topology based on some network metric optimization using RPL Objective Functions. Previous RPL implementations for scalar sensor data communication are not feasible for IoMT, since multimedia traffic pose distinct network requirements. The goal of this paper is to design an enhanced version of RPL for IoMT in which the sensed information is essentially provided by the multimedia devices. Our proposed RPL implementation minimizes carbon footprint emissions and energy consumption, along with the incorporation of application specific Quality of Service requirements. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme a simulation study is carried out in Cooja simulator for Contiki-OS, which suggests significant gains in terms of energy efficiency and delay.