Event-Driven Bandwidth Allocation with Formal Guarantees for Camera Networks

Abstract

Modern computing systems are often formed by multiple components that interact with each other through the use of shared resources (e.g., CPU, network bandwidth, storage). In this paper, we consider a representative scenario of one such system in the context of an Internet of Things application. The system consists of a network of self-adaptive cameras that share a communication channel, transmitting streams of frames to a central node. The cameras can modify a quality parameter to adapt the amount of information encoded and to affect their bandwidth requirements and usage. A critical design choice for such a system is scheduling channel access, i.e., how to determine the amount of channel capacity that should be used by each of the cameras at any point in time. Two main issues have to be considered for the choice of a bandwidth allocation scheme: (i) camera adaptation and network access scheduling may interfere with one another, (ii) bandwidth distribution should be triggered only when necessary, to limit additional overhead. This paper proposes the first formally verified event-triggered adaptation scheme for bandwidth allocation, designed to minimize additional overhead in the network. Desired properties of the system are verified using model checking. The paper also describes experimental results obtained with an implementation of the scheme.