Final Report Summary - CODELANCE (Advanced Network Coding for Video Surveillance) CodeLance was about an industry-academia cooperation that exploits the know-how on ICT of both academic and commercial companies, in order to provide an efficient product for video surveillance over wireless multihop networks to support services like, traffic monitoring, fire detection and real-time events (such as natural disasters) broadcasting for the societies of the smart cities. Video surveillance is an extremely demanding service in terms of QoS provisioning, security and delay guarantees, and requires high-performance wireless networks. Towards this goal, CodeLance employed advanced network coding and security techniques, exploiting the research capacities of its two academic partners. On the other hand, the integration of these mechanisms over a video surveillance product necessitates the involvement of commercial partners who ensured that all practical issues and parameters are addressed in the protocol architecture and that the designed protocols are backward compatible with existing hardware. Towards this goal, two SMES participated in CodeLance to provide their significant industrial and technological expertise. The design of the final video surveillance product required the strong collaboration, equipment sharing, and excess of knowledge transfer between academic and commercial partners to bridge the gap between the theoretical approaches and a ready-to-implement video surveillance protocol. This cooperation took place through inter-sector two-way secondments of research staff with in-built mechanisms and organization of training seminars, trans-national workshops and other networking activities to facilitate sharing of knowledge and culture between the participants. Moreover, recruitment of experienced researchers from outside the partnership broadens the knowledge transfer and brings an added-value to the consortium.The CodeLance consortium consists of 4 partners. Each partner contributes its own particular skills and expertise and had a critical role in the project. Partner expertise smoothly complements each other and all together form the full set of capabilities to lead CodeLance to success. The CodeLance consortium has been constructed in such a way that it is capable of jointly managing all activities and risks involved in all project stages.The activities of CodeLance were shared between the partners and divided into five different workpackages. CodeLance followed a well-structured approach comprised of six fundamental steps:• STEP I: In the first step CodeLance architecture is defined. A thorough review of the state of the art in network coding, security and video surveillance systems by all partners determined CodeLance reference scenarios, use cases, requirements, parameters and evaluation metrics, like throughput, delay, energy consumption per transferred bit and error resilience. A set of “conventional” video surveillance technologies is also identified as reference against which, our approach compared.• STEP II: In the second step we exploited the know-how and significant experience over wireless network foundations of the two academic partners, namely CERTH/ITI from Greece and IT from Portugal, to design innovative network coding and security methods and algorithms capable of performing reliably under a wide range of medium access, network optimization, security constrains and CodeLance scenarios as were identified in STEP I. Our approach was to utilize and optimally exploit the inherent benefits of network coding such as robustness to variations, benefits in terms of bandwidth, transmission power and delay, adaptability to dynamically changing environments, error resilience and ramifications in security to guide the design of a novel networked architecture and algorithms for a video surveillance product. Commercial partners were responsible to ensure that all necessary parameters and requirements for CodeLance proposed algorithms’ later integration in the product considered from their initiation.• STEP III: In the third step, commercial partner IQUADRAT from Spain provided its powerful system level simulation platform to test the innovative solutions that were proposed under Step II over the set of “conventional” video surveillance technologies and in terms of CodeLance metrics, as they were identified in Step I. From the set of proposed mechanisms under Step II, we identified those mechanisms that can be considered for implementation after their thorough performance assessment in IQUADRAT custom made simulator. IQUADRAT’s related experience helps towards this goal.• STEP IV: Based on the input from previous steps, commercial partner ACTICOM from Germany with its remarkable experience on protocol design, leaded the efforts towards building the protocol stack for innovative optimized and secure mechanisms for information transport, flow control and video distribution in order to design the embedded software. The most promising joined network coding and security solutions incorporated in the protocols.• STEP V: In the last step we formed a wireless framework, based on which CodeLance protocol stack evaluated. Towards this goal, we used the already established heterogeneous testbeds of CERTH/ITI and ACTICOM. Several wireless technologies such as WiFi and WiMAX are supported and enriched with features like cameras and sensors, in order to form a realistic development environment for a video surveillance system to support various services for smart cities, like traffic monitoring, fire detection, etc.• STEP VI: Based on the evaluation study of STEP V, the final video surveillance software product designed, under ACTICOM’s leadership, to serve everyday’s life of the citizens, exploiting the know-how and technological framework established in previous steps.During all steps of aforementioned methodology, the collaboration between the academic and commercial partners was constant and evident to bridge the gaps between theory and practice and lead to the transformation of research results into cities’ innovation.
