International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXII, Part 6. Bandung-lndonesia 1999 
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A DISTRIBUTED REMOTE MONITORING SYSTEM TO SUPPORT EARLY FIRE DETECTION 
R. Sureswaran & M. Mohanavelu 
Network Research Group 
School of Computer Sciences 
Universiti Sains Malaysia 
1 1800 Penang, Malaysia 
sures@cs.usm.my 
ABSTRACT 
As networks grow larger and faster, new forms of applications have to be created to support these massive 
infrastructures. Just as great highways are built to support an increase in traffic, high bandwidth networks are 
implemented to support large amounts of network traffic. 
One particular application of interest is the ability to use networks to assist in certain function, like tracking of oil spills, 
weather patterns, disaster warning etc. However, most areas where such fire prevention is needed, the bandwidths and 
network infrastructure is still being built and is generally very limited. 
The topic of this paper is an application related to disaster warning, which is fire warning. This paper discusses the 
structure of a fully distributed multimedia network architecture to support early fire detection. 
The above research is being funded in parts by Universiti Sains Malaysia and Multemedia Reasearch Lab. 
INTRODUCTION 
As the global community is being connected by larger 
and faster networks, new forms of applications have to be 
created to support these massive infrastructures. Just as 
great highways are built to support an increase in traffic, 
high bandwidth networks like APAN(Asia Pasicific 
Advanced Networks) are implemented to support large 
amounts of networks traffic. High Bandwidth networks 
also allow for post-processed satellite images relating to 
fire matters to be transmitted to related sites fairly 
quickly. 
The types of traffic that can be seen by these networks 
can be broadly classified under 3 categories: 
> Traffic that need not be real-time transference (like 
email, ftp, http etc.) 
> Traffic that need to be real-time but non-interactive 
(like video streaming) 
> Traffic that need to be real-time and interactive (like 
telnet, chat, document/video conferencing and full 
multimedia conferencing,) 
Real-time Multimedia applications (interactive and non 
interactive) are becoming an important part of today’s 
networks. Such applications are gaining popularity for 
both the Internet and Corporate Intranets. Some of the 
reasons include the following: 
> Multimedia applications can be easily seen, heard 
and understood. 
> Video streaming will allow instantaneous access to 
video files scattered around the globe. 
necessary. This focus of this paper is to discuss the design 
and implementation of such a distributed system. 
This distributed system should also be implemented in a 
black box style format, where the inputs, outputs and 
requirements of the black box are clearly defined. Also, 
they can plug into a network and perform their 
functionality or be unplugged without crashing the 
system. Message passing is done by using IP. Thus IP 
packets are used to transmit both control and data 
information to these entities and the output will be IP 
formatted packets as well. 
This paper will take us step by step from the theory, 
design stages and finally the implementation, testing and 
commissioning of an example application which uses this 
distributed architecture. This application is called RMS 
(Remote Monitoring System), a central Multi-point 
Multimedia streaming system. 
THE REMOTE MONITORING SYSTEM 
Remote monitoring is a process where a remote area is 
monitored from a distance. Remote Monitoring System 
shortly RMS is developed for that purpose with some 
additional features. The basic concept would be a 
computer attached to a camera would act as a server and 
send images to clients connected to it through the 
internet. Here, we are looking at this application for early 
fire detection in the forest i.e. RMS as a surveillance 
system for forest fires. 
This system would be set up according to Figure 1 . A 
camera, which is placed on a vantage point, like a tower 
on a hill top, would be attached to a computer (server). 
This camera would be capturing images of the area 
desired to be monitored. The server would be also 
In order to allow the current and future network structures 
to support such high bandwidth and resource hungry 
applications, a form of distributed processing is