Switch Enhancement Reduces Camera Network Costs

Story link: Switch Enhancement Reduces Camera Network Costs by Jan Harris

GarrettCom Europe has enhanced its standard layer 2 Ethernet switches with IGMP software. The development significantly reduces the cost of Ethernet traffic management in data intensive video applications where multiple cameras are used.

The IGMP L2 option allows users to utilise standard Ethernet switches instead of the much more expensive layer 3 switches and routers across much of the network. It is often only necessary to use a single layer 3 router as a master.

Metworked security, building surveillance and traffic management systems often use multiple video or CCTV cameras, transmitting data at rates as high as 5Mbps.

This multicast traffic can quickly exceed the bandwidth of a standard Ethernet network. GarrettCom’s IGMP protocol provides a method of managing this traffic.

IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) is a standard defined in RFC1112 and RFC2236, and specifies how a host can register a router to receive specific multicast traffic.

Without IGMP support, multicast traffic is transmitted to all of the ports in each network switch. This unnecessary traffic can flood the interfaces and compromise the performance of the entire network.

IGMP also provides a method of combining the video-over-Ethernet traffic stream from cameras with other typical LAN data traffic, enabling a single, common LAN system to be used for both types of traffic.

IGMP has traditionally required expensive layer 3 routers and switches. GarrettCom has effectively cut costs with the development of standard layer 2 managed Ethernet switches which can now support IGMP.

Instead of broadcasting multicast traffic across all its ports, a GarrettCom layer 2 Ethernet switch with IGMP support provides tighter control of multicast traffic.

Although a layer 3 IGMP master is still required somewhere in the network, the need for multiple layer 3 products is eliminated.