Delay Tolerant Video Upload from Public Vehicles

In this paper we study a surveillance system for public transport vehicles, which is based on the collection of on-board videos, and the upload via wireless transmission to a central security system of video segments corresponding to those cameras and time intervals involved in an accident. We assume that vehicles are connected to several wireless interfaces, provided by different Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), each charging a different cost. Both the cost and the upload rate for each network interface change over time, according to the network load and the position of the vehicle. When a video must be uploaded to the central security, the system has to complete the upload within a deadline, deciding i) which interface(s) to use, ii) when to upload from that interface(s) and iii) at which rate to upload. The goal is to minimize the total cost of the upload, which we assume to be proportional to the data volume being transmitted and to the cost of using a given interface. We formalize the optimization problem and propose greedy heuristics. Results are generated, using real wireless bandwidth traces, showing that one of the proposed greedy heuristics comes very close to the optimal solution.