Reliable Multicast H.264 Video Streaming for Surveillance Applications

It is a common understanding that the surveillance video market is moving to standard, wireline and wireless IP based solutions because of the many advantages over the proprietary RF-based solutions that were deployed previously. State of the art solutions are using the very popular H.264 standard for the video compression. Surveillance video applications differentiate from other video streaming applications in the fact that the delivery of the video has to be very reliable, thus, especially for wireless environments, the usage of UDP as transmission mechanism is not the ideal solution. On the other hand, surveillance video potentially needs to be distributed to many viewers, something that would significantly increase the bandwidth usage if a non UDP-multicasting transmission is used. In this work a solution is proposed to the problem of transmission of surveillance video in a reliable manner, by combining the best of both worlds: An intermediate multicast video server is used for receiving video streams through TCP from the IP camera and transmitting through multicast UDP to the viewers. An implementation of our proposal is described and experimental results are presented and verify the proposed methodology.