HP Networking

Rich Media Communications: the key to public safety in networking

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Is your municipal government investing in video and rich media communications? If not, then public safety could be at risk. Police departments on the west coast use ear-mounted video cameras that capture an officers' view of traffic stops and other incidents. Police departments on the east coast use cameras on patrol cars to scan and track the license plates of each vehicle they pass, enabling them to recoup overdue parking fines.

Dashboard cameras have become commonplace in patrol cars and video is downloaded to a server where the recordings may be stored for a year for internal review or to show in court. Malls, stadiums, downtowns, conferences, public transportation and most places of public gathering have security cameras installed for safety. These IP cameras can be powered over networks. Surveillance has specific requirements like recording for playbacks, motion detection, and integration with analytics software for face recognition and events co-relation.

As more new, media rich technology is brought online to improve collaboration between law enforcement and ultimately keep the public safe, what impact is it having on government networks?

Expert Insight

I had the opportunity to speak with Kowshik Bhat, Global Solutions Marketing Manager, HP Networking. According to Bhat, the greatest impact is to legacy networks. “The networks were designed for data traffic which is bursty in nature. Applications like file share, database access, web applications and emails can tolerate packet loss or delay during transmission. The underlying technology retransmits lost packets or rearranges packets arriving out of sequence. Any packet loss and retransmission during live video stream is visually unpleasant. The networks should be designed to support low latency and end-to-end traffic prioritization.”

Here are 8 considerations for video-ready networks:

original Monique.jpg 1. Low latency: Implement two-tier architecture to deliver a low latency network for video communication.

2. Standards based quality of service: Design a standards-based network that supports end-to-end QoS.

3. Video friendly WAN: Implement stream splitting to minimize WAN bandwidth consumption. Video can be prepositioned overnight when the network is minimally utilized and be made available for local access during prime time.

4. Virtualization for high availability: Design the networks with built-in resiliency to enable video communication.

5. Unified network with multicast: Enable multicast over the wired and wireless network for webcast and video collaboration

6. Multi tiered security: Provide comprehensive security, consider security of the content store, video stream in transit and video application itself.

7. Video collaboration through firewall: Implement video border gateway in the DMZ infrastructure to facilitate secure and interoperable video communication across the firewall.

8. High bandwidth wireless network (WLAN): Implement 802.11n based WLAN with 3X3 MIMO technology for video communication over the wireless network.

We want to hear from you.

Is your government network video ready? What steps are you taking to ensure that your network can handle the demands of rich media?

Want to learn more?

Watch the webinar on “How to accelerate your network HP Networking Webinar Series: How to accelerate media rich network communications for rich media communications” and download free white paper from http://www.hp.com/networking/richmedia to learn more.

>> Read the blog post, “5 key steps to a successful Rich Media Communications implementation for competitive advantage.”

>> Visit the HP Networking blog.

>> Learn more about HP Networking products and solutions.

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