CTCV: A protocol for Coordinated Transport of Correlated Video in Smart Camera Networks

Abstract

Smart camera networks (SCNs) are increasingly used in applications such as homeland security, border control and traffic monitoring. The cameras are often wireless with an organically growing structure, to reduce the overhead of deployment. We frame a new and important problem in SCNs: how to transmit videos from multiple cameras with overlapping coverage given the limited available wireless bandwidth to maximize the quality of the received videos. We call this problem Coordinated Transport of Correlated Videos (CTCV). CTCV is a more general version of 3D video transport: in that problem, highly correlated videos from two cameras (that provide the 3D perspective) are jointly encoded exploiting their pre-defined and known overlap. In contrast, in CTCV there is an arbitrary number of cameras whose overlap is not known apriori and that require transmission as multiple video streams. To effectively support CTCV, we propose a video delivery protocol that consists of two primary components: (1) Consolidation of correlated videos from multiple cameras which removes spatially redundant fields-of-view; and (2) Network and coverage aware bandwidth allocation to optimize coverage quality cooperatively among the different video streams to match the available bandwidth. We formulate the problem of optimal bandwidth allocation for maximizing coverage. We propose and investigate different heuristic policies for bandwidth allocation. We evaluate CTCV using data from a small camera testbed as well as topologies from realistic deployments. Experiments show that CTCV achieves around 10 dB gains in video quality in the scenarios we consider.