Seamless wireless networking for video surveillance applications

The EU FP6 WCAM (wireless cameras and audio-visual seamless networking) project aims to study, develop and validate a wireless, seamless and secured end-to-end networked audio-visual system for video surveillance and multimedia distribution applications. This paper describes the video transmission aspects of the project, with contributions in the areas of H.264 video delivery over wireless LANs. The planned demonstrations under WCAM include the transmission of H.264 coded material over 802.11b/g networks with TCP/IP and UDP/IP being employed as the transport and network layers over unicast and multicast links. UDP based unicast and multicast transmissions pose the problem of packet erasures while TCP based transmission is associated with long delays and the need for a large jitter buffer. This paper presents measurement data that have been collected at the WCAM trial site along with analysis of the data, including characterisation of the channel conditions as well as recommendations on the optimal operating parameters for each of the above transmission scenarios (e.g. jitter buffer sizes, packet error rates, etc.). Recommendations for error resilient coding algorithms and packetisation strategies are made in order to moderate the effect of the observed packet erasures on the quality of the transmitted video. Advanced error concealment methods for masking the effects of packet erasures at the receiver/decoder are also described.