San Diego Rolls Out Wireless Video Surveillance Network

  • Sep 30, 2009

Azalea Networks, a provider of wireless network equipment and technology, and Dotworkz Systems, a provider of crime camera enclosures for public safety systems, recently announced deployment of the first phase of a wireless video surveillance solution for the San Diego Police Department.

The SDPD commissioned the project as a means to provide better monitoring of areas that have experienced increases in crime. The quick deployment of the wireless video surveillance system met the department's needs for an economical yet reliable way to address the crime situation and improve the safety of the community.

Azalea's wireless MSR4000 quad-radio mesh routers were used with Dotworkz' rugged enclosures along with high-resolution PTZ cameras that send high-quality video back to the police headquarters miles away.

The Azalea wireless routers provide high-capacity backhaul and deliver up to 30 frames per second of high-quality video images, deployed in key intersections near San Diego's MTS trolley stations. The Azalea routers also provide the San Diego Police officers with a private, secure 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network, allowing officers to view and control each camera from laptops in their squad cars.

"We needed an economical way to install video surveillance cameras and capture the video in a quick and easy-to-deploy manner," said San Diego's Police Sgt. Matt Dobbs. "This wireless solution made it possible because we would not have been able to run fiber to each camera due to the cost and disruption caused by trenching through parking lots and sidewalks. . . so we can scale the network as needed.”

The new network will enable the SDPD to better focus on key areas which they wish to monitor more closely with the goal of improving the safety of the travelers using the trolley system. Wireless video surveillance systems can cut the costs of a video surveillance deployment as much as 90 percent over installing traditional wired networks. Azalea's patented Layer-3 technology leverages Adaptive Wireless Routing, a distributed routing protocol purpose-built for wireless networks that forwards packets at near nominal wireless data rates across multiple hops with a per-hop latency of under two milliseconds. When combined with Active Video Transport, a popular feature of Azalea's unique wireless video technology, impairments to video quality including jitter and packet loss are removed, and the performance of video applications in a broadband wireless network infrastructure are greatly improved.

"The Layer-3 routing technology of Azalea's wireless solution made the configuration fast and easy... we had the system set up and running in a few hours,” said Quang Trinh, chief technology officer of ProShop Group, the integrator on the project. "Azalea's routing protocol allows different subnets for security purposes, providing for greater isolation and more control. We didn't have to wait for everything to come back through a gateway, which greatly simplified setting up the system and provided better performance."

Last spring, Azalea and Dotworkz Systems announced a partnership to release the industry's first IP camera enclosure or "crime camera" optimized for video with Azalea's wireless routing technology.

The D2 and D3 Series IP camera enclosures from Dotworkz fully integrate the wireless mesh routing capabilities of Azalea's mesh solution.

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