A flexible video streaming system for urban traffic control

This article discusses an innovative system for traffic management that is presently under installation in the city of Valencia. Key features of the system are to exploit open source software components and use MPEG-4 video streaming over an Internet protocol. The video streaming management is particularly sophisticated, resulting in a flexible, efficient, and reliable service. Another important element is the communication network design. In this case, the main issues to address were flexibility, scalability, and fault tolerance. The authors successfully addressed these issues by using a hierarchical network structure, with physical redundancy, based on spanning tree protocols. The overall system is specifically for urban traffic control, but some of its characteristics could make it easily reconfigurable to different contexts and environments.