A bandwidth management framework for wireless camera array

Abstract

Wireless 2D cameras are becoming more widely used for applications such as video surveillance and conferencing due to their easy deployment. These scenarios require multiple high quality video streams that share limited wireless channel resource. Therefore, a bandwidth management that is sensitive to application QoS requirements, content extraction and the specifics of a camera array environment is essential. This paper addresses the problem of bandwidth management to coordinate multiple video flows and to support streaming from wireless camera array. We present a bandwidth management framework that deploys a coordination scheme between the camera array and system resources. Especially, the framework explores different relations and scheduling policies between cameras and the bandwidth allocation to achieve better multi-view video delivery. The implementation uses Linux platform and IEEE 802.11b wireless ad hoc network. Our experimental results show that the bandwidth management framework helps achieving streaming differentiation while maintaining high quality video delivery.