Enhancing Mobile Military Surveillance Based on Video Streaming by Employing Software Defined Networks

Abstract

Situation awareness in surveillance systems benefits from high-quality video streaming service. This is even more important considering military systems, in which delays in image transmission may have a significant impact on the decision-making process. However, in order to deliver high-quality video streaming service, the required network infrastructure may be prohibitively complex, or even completely impossible to deploy, if mobile data providers are considered. Moreover, the demand for high network throughput poses extra requirements on the network. Considering this context, this paper addresses the problem of highly mobile networks composed of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as data providers of a military surveillance system. The proposed approach to tackle the problem is based on a Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach aiming at providing the best routes to deliver the data, enhancing the end-user quality of experience. An extensive experimental campaign was performed by means of simulations and the acquired results provide solid evidence of the usefulness of this proposal.