2327-4662 (c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information. This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JIOT.2017.2671460, IEEE Internet of Things Journal 1 IoMT: A Reliable Cross Layer Protocol for Internet of Multimedia Things Shalli Rani, Syed Hassan Ahmed, Rajneesh Talwar, Jyoteesh Malhotra, and Houbing Song Abstract—The futuristic trend is towards the merging of cyber world with physical world leading to the development of Internet of Things (IoT) framework. Current research is focused on the scalar data based IoT applications thus leaving the gap between services and benefits of IoT objects and multimedia objects. Mul- timedia IoT applications require new protocols to be developed to cope up with heterogeneity among the various communicating objects. In this paper, we have presented a cross-layer protocol for multimedia IoT (IoMT). In proposed methodology, we have considered the cross communication of Physical, Data Link and Routing layers for multimedia applications. Response time should be less, and communication among the devices must be energy efficient in multimedia applications. IoMT has considered both the issues and the comparative simulations in MATLAB have shown that it outperforms over the traditional protocols and presents the optimized solution for multimedia IoT. Keywords—Internet of Things, Cross Layer Protocol, Multime- dia, Network Layer I. I NTRODUCTION The traditional desktops are converting to physical objects in the emerging era to exploit the benefits of Internet of things (IoT). The physical objects surrounding us are joined in one form and providing a network to facilitate communication among different devices [1][2]. Thus the new challenges are emerging, which gave rise to the multiple technologies such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and sensor network in which database and communication protocols that are embed- ded so as to meet needs of the various users.The need is to store and process enormous data and then display it in an efficient and understandable form. This perspective and challenge can This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61572231, and the Science and Technology Program of Shaanxi Province under Grant No. 2016KW-032. Shalli Rani is the corresponding author and with the Department of Com- puter Science, S.S.D. Women’s Institute of Technology, Bathinda (Punjab), India. (email: shalli@ssdwit.org) Syed Hassan Ahmed is with the School of Computer Science and Engi- neering, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Republic of Korea. (email: hassan@knu.ac.kr) Rajneesh Talvar is with the Department of Electrical and Computer En- gineering, CGC Technical Campus, Jhanjeri, Mohali (Punjab), India. (email: rtphdguidance@gmail.com) Jyoteesh Malhotra is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, GNDU Regional Campus, Jalandhar (Punjab), India. (email: jyoteesh@gmail.com) Houbing Song is with the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineer- ing, West Virginia University Institute of Technology, Montgomery, WV 25136 USA. (email: Houbing.Song@mail.wvu.edu) Copyright (c) 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to use this material for any other purposes must be obtained from the IEEE by sending a request to pubs-permissions@ieee.org. Fig. 1: Multi-hop Packet delivery of a MANET [9] be fulfilled by the IoT [3] which, can also be regarded as the extension of the Internet and all sorts of physical objects can communicate with its assistance. There exists various subsystems of IoT. When these sub- systems operate on existing infrastructure, they can exchange the information and control the systems. It is a three layered model with Sensing layer at the bottom, which sense and sends data to its upper layer naming as network layer. It is designed to transmit data to short range heterogeneous devices such as Bluetooth, Zigbee etc and long range transmission for GPRS, 3G etc. The Third and uppermost later is application layer which decode the message, transmitted from lower layer and thus helps in controlling corresponding devices. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are considered as a sub- part of IoT, which acts as data acquisition tool and is used in various industrial aspects related to IoT [4]. Various protocols are being designed to support WSN in multimedia IoT for its heterogeneity as well as for power consumption needs [5][6][7]. Thus, WSN uses CoRE instead of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol in Internet) and OMA- DM Lightweight instead of OMA-DM etc. to support IoT by the WSN limited hardware. In recent past, many cross layer protocols have been proposed for Ad-Hoc Networks (AHNs), Wireless Mesh Networks(WMNs) and wireless sensor networks(WSN)[8]. Although these networks are quite interrelated to each other, still there exists some fundamental differences between them which are on the basis of Data centric, Global Identification, Soundness and Quality of Service metrics (QoS), Scalability, Fault-tolerant,Traffic patterns and operating software [9]. Based on the above mentioned differences, it can be noticed that WSN is more suitable to the wide network with heteroge- neous devices. But this heterogeneity poses many challenges in front of IoT: 1) Physical objects or the things can have different requirements in terms of quality of service metrics (QoS) as time, scalability, fault tolerance etc. Fault tolerance and reliability in the low battery powered devices can be