Solutions

Allied Telesis Solutions for Healthcare

IP Video Surveillance for Healthcare

Ensuring the security of patients and employees is critical to the mission of every healthcare organization. The shift from analog to digital and high-definition technologies is enabling video surveillance and access control technology to become a more strategic tool in protecting assets and people as well as in analyzing incidents to determine cause and avoid repeat situations. As camera, storage, and analytics capabilities progress, the need for an adaptive IP/ Ethernet network infrastructure that scales and optimizes application performance intensifies.

The new-generation IP-based video technologies displacing analog CCTV systems use high-definition, high-megapixel cameras and high-quality lenses to produce full-motion, real-time video. The requirement to have clear, high-resolution, real-time video demands broadband IP to ensure uninterrupted quality. An IP video surveillance system consists of multiple cameras connected to video storage servers recording and processing video streams, and an operations center or hub where video is displayed and monitored on a real-time basis. Many IP security cameras feature 360-degree pan-and-tilt capabilities controlled remotely from an operations center. To support the IP video network and enable remote camera control and operation, a high-speed IP/Ethernet network is required with its design and functionality tailored to IP video applications.

IP security cameras are used in nearly every type of facility and application: on streets, on building exteriors, inside buildings and hallways, in parking lots, and so on. There are many types of fixed or adjustable cameras suited for many applications. In order to serve the wide variety of needs and applications, whether indoors or out, a reliable broadband IP network is needed to connect cameras, servers, and the operations center where monitoring occurs, whether inside a building or atop a roof or traffic light. The range of applications, environments, and even the types of cameras used, all dictate the need for adaptive IP/Ethernet networking infrastructure scalable to and optimized for the specific requirement. A “one solution fits all” approach lacks the robustness and economic efficiency to solve the range of applications required of IP video surveillance.

In a large campus network, or metro-area network, the video surveillance system is typically overlaid on an infrastructure that has been designed to carry multiple applications and services. Such a network, supporting a significant number of end-users, needs to be very reliable, manageable, and scalable. Such applications are often found in several facilities:

• City or municipal street and public surveillance networks
• City or municipal traffic monitoring networks
• Transportation, transit line networks
• Large campuses (hospitals, colleges, universities)
• Large business parks
• Large retail malls
• Military bases

It is also common to find the network in use for multiple services, with a common fiber backbone and switches used to serve more than just IP video needs. There are often other data connections, even other video such as conferencing, and possibly IP voice, within the same network. These requirements are best met by a network design in which different services are partitioned into separate VLANs, and transported over resilient rings protected by an extremely fast failover mechanism.

The Allied Telesis fast-failover ring protection solution is the Ethernet Protected Switching Ring (EPSR). This is an extremely reliable, high-performance ring protection protocol that can restore connectivity within 50ms of a link failure being detected. Services such as video surveillance can each be provisioned with one or more VLANs running over the EPSR rings, with data on Layer 2 or Layer 3 switched between the rings and the central site facility.