FreeBW-RPL: A New RPL Protocol Objective Function for Internet of Multimedia Things

Most of the current research has been restricted to scalar sensor data based IoT applications. However, today's research and development activities rely on multimedia-based services and applications while this kind of applications has several requirements in terms of storage, bandwidth, latency, etc. Furthermore, protocols dedicated to IoT applications have proved their weakness in multimedia environments. Hence, a new paradigm called internet of multimedia things (IoMT) has been proposed to fulfill the requirements of multimedia applications. In this paradigm different multimedia things can interact and cooperate with each other over the Internet. Moreover, IETF ROLL working group standardized an IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL for LLNs) for resource constrained devices. In this paper, we propose an enhanced version of RPL for IoMT called free bandwidth (FreeBW)-RPL in which the sensed data is essentially provided by multimedia devices. FreeBW-RPL protocol proposes a new objective function called FreeBW that takes the FreeBW calculation in the network layer. We set the QoS routing challenge as the amount of the bandwidth while selecting the routing path in order to measure the maximum FreeBW so as to deliver better performance of the multimedia applications. Simulations have been conducted over COOJA simulator. The obtained results proved that our proposal outperforms the basic ones in terms of end-to-end delay, throughput, packet delivery ratio and energy consumption and provides better performance than other protocols.