UAV based real time video surveillance over 4G LTE

Constant video surveillance of remote locations in rural areas, dense urbanized dwellings and strategic military sites is of paramount interest to law enforcing agencies. Aerial monitoring is now made possible by using dozens of camera mounted UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) streaming video from different vantage points to a single command and control center. In this paper, we present an architecture for closed circuit monitoring of such sites, which may consist of multiple indoor and outdoor vantage points by using the legacy 4G LTE wireless network cellular infrastructure in and around the buildings consisting of several outdoor macro cells and indoor femto cells to build a closed-circuit monitoring framework for streaming real time video. Such a framework would lead to timely action in crime or disaster prevention. We investigate the technical performance of such a video streaming system using the metrics of throughputs, loss rates and delay in relation to the physical aspects of wireless propagation; multipath propagation loss, shadowing and fading models.