Optimization Of The Communication Channel Bandwidth For A Multifunctional Monitoring System In Distance

Bexhet Kamo, Adrian Shehu, Rozeta Miho, Indrit Enesi, Vladi Kolici Faculty of Information Technology, Polytechnic University of Tirana Tirana, ALBANIA

Abstract
Design and implementation of a multifunctional monitoring system in distance consist in a system that has to provide video surveillance for in and out of the monitoring sites, temperatures control, humidity control, dew point control, fluid detection, air flow control and also controlling parameters of other devices on site. In this paper we present a model for this system, by considering the bandwidth required for all data transmission. The optimization of bandwidth is done taking into consideration mostly video sensors. The number of video sensors and video resolution are the main parameters that are studied, in order to get the optimum bandwidth required for a normal and acceptable quality of video or other alarms transmitted. Using Matlab we provide the graphical data for the bandwidth and the number of sensors used in real application. The modeled system is implemented in a real case and we have viewed and compared the quality of data and mostly video transmission, for different value of frame rates. The system is modeled based on a base station solution, so the number of sensors that can transmit in real time is limited based on the interface's bandwidth, of the base station. Considering this element and the maximum number of base stations for a site, we give a value for the maximum sensors and base station for one site, based on the channel's bandwidth between remote site and control center. Keywords: monitoring system, temperature control, humidity control, video surveillance.

Introduction
Monitoring of sites in distance is applicable mostly when sites are without personnel but it is also used for security and surveillance purposes. In both cases, video surveillance is the main focus of the system but there are also some important parameters to be monitored like temperature, humidity, air flow, water detection etc. All environmental parameters and a group of alarms and data taken from infrastructures devices are important due to their high impact in the systems availability. By monitoring environmental parameters and trying to keep them inside the predefined limits, we increase the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), an parameter that is deterministic in systems availability value. (1) where MTTR is Mean Time To Repair parameter. Environmental parameters should be monitored (time varying temperature, humidity, air flow, etc) in order to check their trends and to prevent the downtime of systems. For this reason, all alarms and data together with video surveillance should be transmitted, stored and organized in a database in the control centre that usually may be in distance, referring to the site we are monitoring. Presence of video frames in collected data, obligate us to consider bandwidth of the network that connects remote sites with a control centre. Especially for security and surveillance reasons the quality of video frames is required to be relatively high. This condition and the need for real time monitoring, requires a high data rate over the network and due to the limits in bandwidth, that wired or wireless networks have, there should be considered bandwidth optimization, a process that affect quality of data and video frames transmitted. The problem may be solved by compressing the data and video but this process should be determined carefully in order to minimize the bandwidth required for an acceptable quality. Parameters like frames per second, resolution, maximum number of sensors, etc, are taken into consideration for the transmission channel bandwidth optimization. The real time video transmission is treated in details in this paper because the bandwidth occupied by environmental sensors and third party devise sensors is relatively small, compared to the bandwidth required by video frames.

BALWOIS 2010 - Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia - 25, 29 May 2010

Design of the system

The problem of video and environmental monitoring in real time, in remote sites, includes video surveillance and controlling (monitoring) of parameters like temperature, humidity, dew point, air flow, unauthorized access, fluid detection etc. There are controlled also some parameters of other equipments in site, like air conditioners, generators etc. All these parameters, for each site, should be controlled from a managing centre in distance and all data and alarms should be organized in a data base, for later use. The information, we intent to monitor or control, flows as in figure 1.

Figure 1, Schematic diagram of informations flow The information we collect from sites is related to: inside and outside video surveillance of sites, inside environmental monitoring of sites, access control of sites and control of parameters and alarms for other equipments. In figure 2, is showed the main scheme of the real system, with sites in distance and control centre. The system is designed with two sites in distance (where one of them serves also as a repeater) and a managing and control centre. The communication can be realized by integrating all elements in an IP network, using a microwave link between sites. In order to integrate all elements in an IP network, we may use a base station in each site. The base station serves as a managing point of sensors that in general are not intelligent. The data and alarms can be saved in storage with limited capacity, in the base station, in order to download them locally or in distance. The configuration for each site, considering that we have two shelters in each site, is showed on figure 3. After collecting of video and alarms from each site, we send them to the managing center, in the central server. The schematic diagram for connecting of base stations with central server is showed on figure 4. The next step is connecting of sensors with respective base station and the information collection, from sensors, to the central server. The principal diagram is given in figure 3, where base stations have an Ethernet interface to be connected to the IP network and other interfaces for sensors of temperature, humidity, air flow, video, access etc. The different nature of the sensors and theirs outputs, may complicate the interfacing of sensors with base station. In order to eliminate this problem we may use a universal interface, regardless of the sensors. The base stations should have also dry contact inputs for alarms and data of different equipments on site. The bandwidth of microwave link will be conditioned by: frame resolution, bit per pixel value, frame rate, number of video cameras connected to each base station, bandwidth occupied by other data and alarms and compression method used (for video frames). There are also some technical conditions to be considered, like: sensor to base station distance, maximum number of sensors (including video cameras) to be managed from a base station, maximum number of base stations to be managed by the central server, the bandwidth of transmission line (that affects mostly the quality of video frames). The Optimization of communication channel bandwidth is related to video frames parameters, like: frame resolution, bit per pixel value, frame rate, compression method. Since the effect of other data and alarms is relatively very small, we will take into consideration only the video frames.

BALWOIS 2010 - Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia - 25, 29 May 2010

Figure 2, Scheme of the system with sites and managing center

Figure 3, Configuration of a site

Figure 4, Base stations and the central server in an IP network

Theoretical calculation of the bandwidth and its optimization

BALWOIS 2010 - Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia - 25, 29 May 2010

The bandwidth calculation is based on parameters that are deterministic in the size of video frames. By calculating the size of video frames and by selecting the frame rate and compression method, we calculate the bandwidth required for real time video transmission. Figure 5, shows the graph that can be used for bandwidth calculation.

Figure 5, Flowchart for the bandwidth calculation, occupied by video frames The size of bandwidth is the bandwidth required for video frames transmission plus bandwidth required for environmental data and alarms. Since the bandwidth required for environmental data and alarms is relatively small, we study in details only the bandwidth required for real time video transmission. Some other parameters that are not mentioned in the flowchart but that have an important role in real time video transmission are latency, caused by compression method selected, and motion detection (an parameter of video cameras). The latency is an important parameter (that affects the real time video transmission) and for bandwidth optimization we should select between compression methods that offer an acceptable latency and a higher video compression value. There BALWOIS 2010 - Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia - 25, 29 May 2010

are a lot of compression methods like MJPEG, MPEG4, H264, etc. To optimize the bandwidth we may change parameters like: resolution and bit per pixel, frame rate and compression value. Frame resolution and bit per pixel value, are both related to the image quality. So if we intent to decrease the resolution or the bit per pixel value, we will lose the image quality. For video surveillance with normal quality is required to have a resolution of 640 x 480 and 16 or 24 bit per pixel value. Using matlab we can calculate the uncompressed frame size for different resolution values, as in figure 6.

Figure 6, Uncompressed frame size for different resolutions and bit per pixel values For a resolution 640 x 480 and for 16 bit per pixel value, there is needed around 5Mbps bandwidth (for one uncompressed frame per second). The frame rate is a parameter that takes values from 1 to 30 frames per second. As lower the frame rate as lower the bandwidth required. For video surveillance with a normal quality is required a frame rate of 25 frame per second, but based on the bandwidth value we can transmit using lower values, like 15, 10 or 5 frames per second. Using matlab, we may create an idea how the bandwidth changes for different frame rate values, as in figure 7 (the case is studied for images with 640 x 480 resolution and 16 bit/pixel value). The blue color graph, in figure 7, shows the bandwidth required for one video camera with frame rates from 1 to 30 frames per second, 640 x 480 resolution and 16 bit/pixel value. For instance, the bandwidth required for 10 uncompressed frames per second, 640 x 480 and 16 bit per pixel, is 50 Mbps. In order to optimize the bandwidth required, we compress the video frames. In figure 7, is showed the required bandwidth for different compression values. For instance, the bandwidth required for 10 frames per second with a resolution 640 x 480 and 16 bit per pixel value, goes from 50 Mbps, for uncompressed frames, to 5Mbps for a compression 10:1 and around 2.5 Mbps for compression 20:1. The bandwidth optimization can be done by changing the up mentioned parameters in a level that not change the minimum quality required.

BALWOIS 2010 - Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia - 25, 29 May 2010

Figure 7, Bandwidth for one video camera for different frame rates and compression rates for a frame with 640 x 480 resolution and 16 bit per pixel value

Practical implementation, results and discussions

Based on the system design (described above) and in the theoretical calculations of bandwidth is implemented in practice a monitoring and control system in distance. The configuration of system is given in figure 8. The system has two sites in distance and a control centre. Each site has a base station where video cameras and environmental sensors are connected. Besides, in the base stations are connected also sensors of alarms and data that comes from third party devices. Video, alarms and data collected to the bases station are transmitted, through the router, to the control centre. What should be solved next is the maximum number of video cameras for each base station. This number can be calculated based on the base station interface bandwidth. It is an Ethernet interface and offers 100Mbps and if the monitoring will be in a LAN (100Mbps) considering that around 10% will be used for other data there is 90% or 90Mbps to be used for video surveillance. The maximum number of video sensors can be calculated using formula (2). (2) where comp. is the value of compression (for instance, if the compression is 10:1, comp. value is 0.1). Whether frames parameters (that comes from the image processor) are set as: 640 x 480, 24 bit color, 25 frames per second, compression of 10:1, we see that one video sensor occupies around 19Mbps and for three video cameras, as in the practical implementation, is needed around 60Mbps. The number of sensors depends on resolution and frame rate and considering a fixed bit per pixel value and a fixed bandwidth the dependence (using matlab) is given in figure 9. In the microwave link bandwidth is 2Mbps (for each base station) so in order to transmit in real time for three video cameras simultaneously the value of frame rates shall go to 5 frames per second, 320 x 240 resolution, 24 bit per pixel value and with 20:1 compression (the bandwidth occupied in this is around 1.4Mbps). Considering that video cameras are with motion sensors, for one camera transmitting in the real time the frame rate goes to 15 frames per second (without changing of other parameters).

BALWOIS 2010 - Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia - 25, 29 May 2010

Figure 8, Connection of the base station with sensors and information routing in the real system

Figure 9, The Maximum number of video cameras in a 100Mbps network for different resolutions, 24bit per pixel and 20:1 compression value

BALWOIS 2010 - Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia - 25, 29 May 2010

Conclusions
A system designed for video, alarms and environmental real time monitoring in distance, requires an accurate calculation of the bandwidth. The bandwidth will be shared for video cameras and for environmental sensors, but since the video occupies a large part of the bandwidth, we pay more attention to the real time video transmission, without considering bandwidth occupied by alarms and data of environmental sensors. In order to optimize the bandwidth, we take into consideration parameters that are deterministic in video size, like: resolution, bit per pixel value, frame rate, number of cameras in system and compression method. In this paper we showed a simple method to calculate and optimize the bandwidth, by changing: frame rate, number of video cameras, bit per pixel value, resolution and compression value. The parameter or parameters that will be change for bandwidth optimization depends on system requirements and for each case we should decide what to change. Whether there are strictly requirements for a parameter, let say frame quality, we keep as unchanged this parameter (in our case the minimum required resolution and bit per pixel value) and operate with other parameters (in this case: frame rate, number of video cameras and compression method). The selected compression method should not affect the video quality requirements so we may use MJPEG by compressing each frame or may use MPEG-4 or H264 for a higher compression. The selection between compression methods will be based on latency and video quality allowed by system requirements. The graphics and dependencies showed above can be used to create an idea for the bandwidth required in a real case.

References
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BALWOIS 2010 - Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia - 25, 29 May 2010