Enhancing industrial video surveillance over wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Industry 4.0 brings forward higher requirements on the monitoring of industrial production. Video surveillance based on Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) has demonstrated its effectiveness in a number of applications. Different from some typical applications of WMN that solve the "last mile" Internet access problem, WMN-based video surveillance for industrial monitoring is very likely to work in extreme circumstances or requiring high performance. Thus, the guarantee of video quality is the key for the success of industrial video surveillance. Through extensive experimental research, we find that the state of the art mapping and queuing algorithms are approaching complication and the room for improvement is decreasing. The possible solution for performance breakthrough lies in exploiting the potentials of data granularity for mapping. In this work, we propose IMesh, a video transmission solution based on WMN, which takes frame type, frame location, data packets and other factors into consideration and quantifies their impacts on video quality. The proposed approach is particularly suitable for video surveillance in industrial production under aggressive conditions. To the best of our knowledge, IMesh is the first one that differentiates, prioritizes, and schedules video data in the packet level, which is the finest granularity one can achieve while keep the MAC layer protocol unchanged. Experiment results show that the proposed solution outperforms previous works both in terms of video quality and packet delay.