A new type of network architecture – Wireless Optical Mesh – makes video surveillance viable in outdoor environments.

In post-9/11 America, we've become more comfortable smiling for the cameras in airports, parking garages, lobbies, schools – anywhere that security threats might arise. And now the owners of these facilities are making massive investments in state-of-the-art security technologies, to the tune of $6 billion in 2006 alone, according to strategic consulting firm A4 International.

The ideal security system, according to both security and technology experts, is a single, powerful network infrastructure that maintains live video surveillance centrally, along with other sophisticated applications. With centralized video surveillance, security personnel can monitor video streams from many dispersed cameras in real time. Even more important, video-analytics software can rapidly evaluate threats that appear in any of the video streams and even respond to them automatically.

Property managers, too, can benefit by combining video surveillance on an IP network along with other applications like electronic door-entry systems and environmental monitoring. Better yet, if the “pipes” are big, fast and affordable enough, this highly secure network can support communications functions like high-speed Internet access and low-cost, Internet-based telephony along with the security and building-management applications.

But even though surveillance cameras themselves are affordable, and even though broadband, wireless and video technologies have been advancing at a rapid clip, deploying centralized surveillance systems hasn’t been easy. The logistics are tricky, and the cost of creating a robust and reliable network infrastructure can be dauntingly high. Once such an infrastructure can be cost-effectively deployed, real-time video – a technology long in search of a “killer app” – can become viable, financially as well as physically.

Security Comes to the Mall

Westfield UTC (formerly University Towne Centre) is a high-end outdoor shopping center in the University City neighborhood of San Diego, California. Its retail campus is home to more than 180 shops, two dozen restaurants and an ice-skating rink. Last year, Westfield UTC’s property management company tapped independent engineering firm Wireless Facilities Inc. (WFI) to design what was originally envisioned as a WiFi network.

Wireless optical mesh supports video surveillance cameras, high-speed LAN and other services at Westfield UTC.

Desmond Wheatley, president of WFI’s Enterprise Services Division, recalls, “Westfield’s initial vision was for us to build a wireless infrastructure that primarily supported its WiFi hotspots and fulfilled its requirement for a kiosk-based point-of-sale system. We wanted to design a network that would support UTC’s future needs and would tie in the video surveillance system into a fully converged network.”

However, once video surveillance was added to the requirements, WiFi was no longer a workable solution. Since more than 70 video surveillance cameras were scattered throughout the mall, the video alone required too much bandwidth for traditional WiFi deployments.

WFI next considered extending fiber to each of the buildings in the retail campus, but eventually decided that this approach was too expensive and invasive for UTC. The shopping center has tiled walkways, fountains and meticulously landscaped grounds where customers walk, and all of this would have had to be dug up to install fiber.

But WFI found a cutting-edge, high-capacity wireless solution that would connect all the buildings to a single converged wireless network with a common network operations center, data center, and security surveillance center in the main administrative office.

A new networking model called the “wireless optical mesh,” introduced in 2006, addresses the speed, cost and flexibility issues that have kept real-time surveillance and centralized convergence from becoming a reality.
 

Making Video Viable

In order to centralize video surveillance, local-area networks and wide-area networks must be extended to include physical security devices like surveillance cameras and door sensors. And for the solution to be viable, the converged network must not only be cost-effective but must have enough capacity and reliability to support the security devices.

Real-time video security requires fiber-like speed and capacity along with WiFi’s costs and flexibility.

In all three areas, security requirements set a high bar. For starters, networked video surveillance involves transporting large (and rapidly increasing) amounts of data generated by an ever-increasing number of IP video surveillance cameras. The high video quality needed to provide the required image detail for content analysis and real-time event correlation and response raises the stakes. Sensors, remote entry controls and other building control applications further mandate high network reliability. 

While fiber can provide the required capacity and reliability, trenching fiber to many locations across a campus or metro area is often cost-prohibitive and much too inflexible. The process of securing rights of way, digging up streets or walkways and deploying infrastructure not only bleeds budgets dry but confounds schedules as well.

The bottom line is: for real-time video to be effective in campus or multisite corporate deployments, fiber-like speed and capacity are required, along with costs and flexibility that are better than fiber can offer. Or, to put it another way, WiFi’s costs and flexibility are required, along with capacity and service reliability that are better than WiFi can offer.

The emerging “Wireless Optical Mesh” architecture strikes the balance between fiber and WiFi. This new approach slashes deployment and ongoing costs while providing wireless flexibility to hundreds of IP video surveillance cameras and fiber-like capacity and reliability.

The Wireless Optical Mesh architecture is comprised of a network of low-cost wireless switching nodes that lets network operators extend service capacity and connectivity from fiber-lit buildings across a campus or even a city. Lowering the costs of this type of connectivity to about $5,000 per building, the Wireless Optical Mesh reduces WAN costs to less than 10 percent of fiber.

Small, low-cost nodes inexpensively and rapidly extend high-capacity, high-quality services to scores of new buildings. The interference-free, license-free infrared spectrum used by ClearMesh not only reduces the up-front capital costs but improves performance, thus overcoming traditional objections with other wireless alternatives.

Wireless Optical Mesh also has enough service capacity to provide high-speed in-and-outdoor backhaul for the cameras. With 300 Mbps of wire-speed, full-duplex, wireless switching capacity per node, a small mesh network with just a few nodes can provide networking capacity for hundreds of video cameras with latencies of less than 0.1 millisecond per node.

The Ethernet-based Wireless Optical Mesh makes it possible to build a wireless IT infrastructure supporting hundreds of IP video surveillance cameras in and around surrounding buildings. Internet access and low-capacity VoIP traffic literally “ride for free” over a streaming video surveillance network (or the other way around).

Building managers can resell Internet access, WiFi hot zones, IP telephony or point-of-sale transaction services to their retail tenants.

Finally, the mesh architecture of the network guarantees at least two routes into each building for optimal resilience. This way, as the mesh grows, additional redundancy paths provide alternate fall-back routes. This inverts the usual wireless model as performance and reliability actually improve with growth and increased density.

Private wide-area networks with indoor and outdoor IP video surveillance, along with other centralized IT applications, can dramatically improve both security and efficiency for office parks, industrial parks, parking garages, shopping centers and other geographically dispersed organizations. Centralized monitoring and recording solutions for dozens of buildings across a campus or metro area not only cut costs and free up personnel – they actually create potential new revenue streams. Building managers can use the resulting high-capacity IT networks to resell services such as Internet access, WiFi hot zones, IP telephony or point-of-sale transaction services to their tenants.

Clear Days at UTC

Once Westfield UTC made the decision to use Wireless Optical Mesh, installation proved simple. The wireless backbone that would support the digital CCTV system and the WFI-owned WiFi hotspot network was deployed in just a few days. Construction tasks such as installing metal conduit on the roof, constructing masts and other nonpenetrating roof mounts, installing equipment cabinets in the electrical closets and extending electrical power to the devices took up nearly all of the backbone deployment time. As soon as the site was prepared, all that was left was to quickly configure the devices and plug them into the brand-new network. Then, to provide extra peace of mind to the customer, ClearMesh experts tested the network remotely, using a T1 connection.

One of the questions Westfield UTC managers posed was how weather conditions would affect this outdoor optical network. While rain and fog don’t cause problems, direct sunshine on a node can temporarily interrupt or cripple an optical link – and at certain times of day in sunny San Diego, this happens to the UTC network. But the network’s mesh design allows for a constantly available redundant path to all nodes. Even when a link is knocked out by sunshine, or by any other factor, there is always another way for the data to get where it’s going.

“Securing” Success

Video may have found its killer app in security, a massive market that is on the verge of overcoming its perennial cost and quality issues. With the promise of convergence of video surveillance and other networked security applications with high-speed Internet, telephony and e-mail services, benchmarks for reliability, quality of service, capacity and flexibility continue to rise.

As we grapple with the new realities of heightened awareness and tighter security, governments, businesses and individuals alike will continue to call on new technologies to ensure peace, and peace of mind. The Wireless Optical Mesh makes centralized, high-speed video surveillance – and the security it represents – viable.
 

About the Author: Fima Vaisman is Senior Vice President of Marketing at ClearMesh Networks, a communication equipment vendor that offers a wireless optical mesh solution. Mr. Vaisman has been responsible for driving technology, product and marketing strategy for enterprise and carrier access solutions.