Suitability Analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 Networks for Video Surveillance

The emerging IEEE 802.15.4 wireless communication standard is designed for a low data rate, low power consumption and low range wireless transmissions wireless personal area networks (WPANs). The improvement of this technology for the transmission of information at high rate such as video is a challenge that gives us the opportunity to support additional services. This paper deals with the feasibility study of video transmission over 802.15.4 networks such as Zigbee. We carry out performance evaluation of MPEG-4 video transmission under various scenarios such as effect of background traffics (CBRs) on video and behavior of multiple videos when transmitted simultaneously. The simulation is carried for both single and two hop communication networks. The performance differentials are analyzed using one of the objective QoS parameters such as PSNR (Peak signal to noise ratio), frame loss and average end to end frame delay. The results show that even though IEEE 802.15.4 is a low data rate communication standard, it provides a good human acceptable video quality required for the applications like video surveillance.