Enhancing Rescue Operations With Virtualized Mobile Multimedia Services in Scarce Resource Devices

Asier Atutxa,Jasone Astorga,Juanjo Unzilla,Maider Huarte,Eduardo Jacob

doi:10.1109/access.2020.3041394

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present an architecture to support reconfigurable multimedia services for a practical emergency environment use case of rescue operations. Specifically, radio communication and video surveillance services are provided by means of a small device carried by a mobile vehicle. This solution is validated by implementing a digital mobile radio (DMR) standard radio hotspot and a video streaming server in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that conveys a device with scarce resources in order to minimize power consumption. To achieve a fast and flexible deployment of the envisioned services, a virtualization-based approach is proposed. Namely, a Kubernetes orchestrator is used to manage the life-cycle of services deployed on a small resource device, endowing the architecture with scalability and management flexibility. This article describes the executed performance tests that measured key parameters such as deployment time and recovery time after disconnection. Highly promising results were obtained, showing that the proposed architecture can be deployed in less than 4 minutes and can recover from network disconnections in less than 10 seconds. Thus, the performance, reliability and flexibility of the overall solution are demonstrated.

Highlights

R ECENT technological developments are changing society radically, and almost every aspect of life can be improved by taking advantage of those innovations
On the left-hand side, we show the functional blocks related to the Raspberry Pi device installed onboard the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
WORK This paper presents a general architecture that has been tailored to a specific practical use case, providing a solution to rescue missions in areas where mobile network coverage is not available by providing digital mobile radio (DMR) radio service and video streaming

Summary

Introduction

R ECENT technological developments are changing society radically, and almost every aspect of life can be improved by taking advantage of those innovations. The two main factors that have caused the growth in multimedia services are increased bandwidth in network communications and new compression algorithms that can be implemented due to more powerful CPUs. The two main factors that have caused the growth in multimedia services are increased bandwidth in network communications and new compression algorithms that can be implemented due to more powerful CPUs Compression algorithms such as H.264 [1] can achieve a compression factor of 1000:1 easing video transmission over all kinds of networks. Multimedia services such as video streaming have become popular with video streaming service subscriptions spreading from 52% to 74% of households in the U.S between 2015 and 2019 [2]. According to some studies [4] further growth will occur in the few years, showing the importance of this market worldwide [5]

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