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
