First multicast mesh network assists NT police

Gordon Peters
Thursday, 09 December 2010 17:55

IT Industry - Deals

South Australian digital transmissions systems vendor, MIMP, has deployed a self-healing wireless network for the Northern territory police which provides for closed circuit television monitoring of trouble spots in Darwin.

{loadpositioin peter}Project manager, STS, selected the Adelaide-based network specialist, MIMP, to design and deploy Australia's first multicast mesh IP-based wireless network, with the ability to self-heal any points of failure and to survive lightning strikes.

Since the Darwin Street Camera wireless network was deployed in December 2009, it has successfully transported hundreds of gigabytes of video data each day without any major disruptions or outages.

'We chose MIMP based on their previous experience and the fact that they'd delivered similar projects elsewhere," said STS managing director, Greg Ireland.

According to Ireland, since the Darwin Street Camera wireless network was deployed in December 2009, it has successfully transported hundreds of gigabytes of video data each day without any major disruptions or outages.

In 2009, the Northern Territory Government and the Australian Government committed $8.612 million to establish a Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) system to equip NT Police to monitor and reduce anti-social behaviour on the streets of Darwin. After a competitive tender, the NT Police Fire and Emergency Services Department chose Darwin-based security company Security & Technology Services (STS) to deliver the project.

Ireland said the Darwin Street Camera project required STS to integrate 47 existing CCTV cameras deployed at 'hotspots' - mass passenger transport systems as well as bus interchanges - with 62 new Pan, Tilt & Zoom cameras installed at popular congregation points at Casuarina, Palmerston and Darwin.

Ireland said that due to the prohibitive cost of connecting all the cameras with fibre optic cable, STS needed a highly reliable wireless network to allow NT Police personnel to monitor the 109 cameras, control them remotely and record high-resolution vision of any incidents that are of a quality fit for use in a court for prosecution purposes.

'Major challenges of transmitting high definition video streams from the cameras to three police stations - plus a fourth remote storage facility - were to avoid network congestion from the large volume of data traffic and to eliminate the risk caused by single points of failure. The demanding Top End environment delivered difficulties including high year-round heat and humidity plus thousands of lightning strikes a day during the turbulent Wet Season. Another issue was vandalism.'

Ireland said STS selected MIMP connecting solutions to design and deliver the highly redundant, high performance wireless network to integrate the Darwin Street Camera system, and STS also deployed an optical fibre ring network to augment the system's high-capacity wireless backhaul.

MIMP general manager, Allan Aitchison, said that to meet the demanding Darwin climate and operational challenges, MIMP decided the wireless network needed to be self-healing, so it would keep working if part of the network went offline.

According to Aitchison, MIMP searched internationally to identify the best self-healing network architecture for the Darwin Street Camera project, which covers a total of six square kilometres, and selected network equipment from Strix Systems, a US-based global leader in wireless mesh networking.

'The multicast mesh structure gave the Darwin wireless network both resilience and redundancy. To our knowledge, this is the first multicast mesh network in Australia,' Aitchison said.

'A multicast mesh network provides the richest connectivity and is very robust, because it self-heals if devices disappear off the network. By designing the network so each device accepts messages, even if the device is not on the shortest path from a camera to the police station, it routes data around any disrupted areas, so there's no single point of failure. Further robustness is added by the use of multiple subnets, so the second and third subnets can continue operating even if one area goes down.'