A Simulation of a Networked Video Monitoring System Using NS2

Abstract

            The work presented in this paper has focused on the simulation of video streaming over a hybrid (wired-wireless) network for the purpose of monitoring. A simulation scenario has been designed and implemented using the network simulator (NS2) to realise the network system. The system consists of 5 nodes, 3 of which are video cameras that play two major roles. First of all, capturing moving objects within a radius of 20 metres and secondly to work as a wireless routers within the network. Furthermore, the two nodes have different purposes; the fourth node works as an access point to connect the cameras which are wirelessly connected together and with the access point. However, the fifth node performs the job of a server which is wired-connected to the access point and has the video encoding/decoding and quality of service (QoS) calculations routines.The system has been implemented and tested under simulation environment and two types of assessment have been performed. The first assessment was to measure the quality of service from a networking point of view for which three factors have been used; namely: Packet Loss, End-to-End Throughput and Jitter. The second assessment was to measure the quality of the received videos using Peak signal to Noise Ratio "PSNR" measure. For simulation purposes 3 videos of type H.264 have been used to represent the 3 cameras streams. Evalvid framework is used to transform them into a streaming format to facilitate the evaluation of video streaming over a simulated network. The simulation process has shown a promising results in both network's QoS and video quality with the average packet loss of 0.04%, average time delay of 0.9sec and average jitter of 0.001951. More after, the video quality has shown an average "PSNR" of 30.13 when 1530 frames have been transmitted with STDV of 6.85.