RPL Enhancement to Support Video Traffic for IoMT Applications

Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT), a special subset of Internet of Things (IoT), is a novel paradigm which is progressively increasing and gaining in popularity, allowing many multimedia content based applications such as Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs). The standard IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL), originally designed for transmitting scalar data traffic of IoT applications, should be customized in order to deal with IoMT applications which pose new challenges and requirements in terms of the Quality of Service (QoS) and the user’s Quality of Experience (QoE). For this purpose and thanks to the flexibility and adaptability of RPL, we propose, in this paper, a multipath version of RPL, not defined in the RPL specification RFC 6550, named MP-RPL. MP-RPL leverages the multiparent feature offered by RPL in order to construct multiples end-to-end paths of different qualities based on radio link quality measurements. It is intended to improve the video traffic delivery for IoMT based WMSN applications by simultaneously using the built paths while taking into account the video traffic differentiation as per priority levels. Compared to the traditional single-path RPL, the results obtained from simulations when considering the influence of video characteristics, show that our proposal provides feasible and acceptable QoS and QoE performance metrics for multimedia applications, while maintaining RPL compliance.