Efficient zero-copy mechanism for intelligent video surveillance networks

Abstract

Most of today’s intelligent video surveillance systems are based on Linux core and rely on the kernel’s socket mechanism for data transportation. In this paper, we propose APRO, a novel framework with optimized zero-copy capability customized for video surveillance networks. Without the help of special hardware support such as RNIC or NetFPGA, the software-based APRO can effectively reduce the CPU overhead and decrease the transmission latency, both of which are much appreciated for resource-limited video surveillance networks. Furthermore, unlike other software-based zero-copy mechanisms, in APRO zero-copied data from network packets are already reassembled and page aligned for user-spac applications to utilize, which makes it a ‘true’ zero-copy solution for localhost applications. The proposed mechanism is compared with standard TCP and netmap, a typical zero-copy framework. Simulation results show that APRO outperforms both TCP and localhost optimized netmap implementation with the smallest transmission delay and lowest CPU consumption.