The Internet of Things is a central enabler, facilitated by the widespread availability of low-power sensors, partially autonomous actuators and robots, smartphones, and tablets, and their wireless connectivity solutions. For optimized use, these elements should be combined with proper scalable network infrastructures and dynamically extensible software platforms capable of integrating sensors/actuators discovered at runtime. Mobile edge or fog computing has been demonstrated to be able to optimize network infrastructure usage in such challenging scenarios by dynamically exploiting virtualized resources, such as allocated network resources, processing functions, and storage space, at computing edges and reducing the need for interworking and continuous connectivity with the global cloud in the form of geographically remote datacenters.

With the proliferation of the internet and user-generated content and the growing prevalence of cameras, mobile phones, and social media, huge amounts of multimedia data are being produced, forming a unique kind of big data. Multimedia big data brings tremendous opportunities for applications and services, such as multimedia searches, recommendations, advertisements, healthcare services, and smart cities. Media cloud systems which perform multimedia storage, processing, delivery, and service are a natural solution to deal with the problems of multimedia big data. Internet of Things (IoT)-based media computing and communications are promising technologies to orchestrate the multimedia services between mobile clients and the media cloud system. However, IoT-based media also suffers from immense obstacles due to discrepancies in computational ability, the dynamic communication environment, random network establishment, and the diverse services of large-scale media applications. Therefore, the transmission of such massive datasets presents challenges and opportunities in the big data era.

This Special Issue aims to foster the growth of a new research community, acting as an international forum for researchers and practitioners in academia and industry to present research that advances the state of the art and practice of communication for multimedia big data, identifying emerging research topics and defining the future of the field. We hope to attract original and high-quality articles covering novel theoretical and practical applications of transmitting multimedia big data, surveys of recent progress and challenges in this area, and the intelligence that can be leveraged from multimedia classification, search, and recommendation towards cloud-based communications. We welcome both original research and review articles.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• IoT-based multimedia content sharing networks
• Advanced network architecture design for IoT-based multimedia delivery
• Cooperative schemes for IoT-based multimedia communications
• Resource management and quality of service/quality of experience provisioning for media cloud computing
• Data security, privacy, and reliability for media clouds
• Transmission standardization activities related to media cloud systems
• Automatic and interactive multimedia data collection and analysis
• Multimedia modeling with collective intelligence and applications, including classification, clustering, and recommendation
• Social media propagation and mining in the IoT