IP Camera Traffic on LAN

[upstatemike]

Just curious if anybody knows what impact IP camera streaming has on a LAN? Assuming you use multiple clients to view your cameras (4 or 5 TS07 touch screens for example) and you keep the camera view up on all of them most of the time, how much traffic does that put on your LAN?

I'm trying to estimate my future bandwidth requirements for my LAN and I started to realize that 4 clients viewing cameras plus a dozen IP music players providing whole house music plus a couple of SAGETV sessions plus 2 or 3 PCs hitting the router to browse the Internet... eventually this could add up to serious bandwidth.!

 

[Digger]

Just curious if anybody knows what impact IP camera streaming has on a LAN? Assuming you use multiple clients to view your cameras (4 or 5 TS07 touch screens for example) and you keep the camera view up on all of them most of the time, how much traffic does that put on your LAN?

I'm trying to estimate my future bandwidth requirements for my LAN and I started to realize that 4 clients viewing cameras plus a dozen IP music players providing whole house music plus a couple of SAGETV sessions plus 2 or 3 PCs hitting the router to browse the Internet... eventually this could add up to serious bandwidth.!

I was thinking along those lines recently as well. I havent used Sage in about a year but I recently emailed them to ask for my keys as they were lost when a computer died. I was planning on running a seperate LAN for Sage so not to congest my existing LAN. I have almost everything I would need (router, switches, wires run etc).

 

[gatchel]

Typically if you set up an IP camera to stream MPEG4 your bandwidth is controllable within the camera setup. For example, if you set up the connection stream per client to 512k you will have 512k per connection to camera from each client. 5 users woukld create 2.5Mb/s bandwidth unless you are using multi-cast.

MJPEG requirements are typically more depending in quality and image size.

 

[upstatemike]

Typically if you set up an IP camera to stream MPEG4 your bandwidth is controllable within the camera setup. For example, if you set up the connection stream per client to 512k you will have 512k per connection to camera from each client. 5 users woukld create 2.5Mb/s bandwidth unless you are using multi-cast.

MJPEG requirements are typically more depending in quality and image size.

I think my Panasonic cameras are MJPEG only and I usually run 4 cameras at 320X240 (so I can see all four on the screen at once) to 3 PCs and a camera server thingy that Panasonic makes to feed my TV modulator. So 4 cameras X 4 streams each so far.

 

[personalt]

I don have exact numbers but I wll say minimal.. I view 4 cameras over a DSL line that has slow upload speed. Maybe 1 meg tops.. so even a regular 100 meg switch will be way more then enough not to get in the way of other stuff.

 

[CollinR]

You should run your cameras on a dedicated LAN so they are not effected by other issues on your PC network.

In my installs the only way to access the cameras is through the DVR, everything else is locked down.

 

[upstatemike]

You should run your cameras on a dedicated LAN so they are not effected by other issues on your PC network.

In my installs the only way to access the cameras is through the DVR, everything else is locked down.

So the DVR can connect to 2 different LANs? The private one with the cameras and the regular one that has access to the Internet?

 

[DeLicious]

i too have all of my IP camera traffic and zomeminder recording the cameras on one router, but that router is connected to my other router so it is available to anything on my main network that wants to view the info.

 

[CollinR]

You can do it either way, the DVR can act as a bridge and provide dhcp services to the camera network or you can simply add a router/firewall between the DVR and the PC network and configure port forwarding to the DVR.

 

[Photon]

Doesn't a layer two switch effectively break up the LAN traffic? I thought that was the big advantage of the switch vs a layer one hub. The hub simply took each incoming packet and repeated it on all the other ports, thus causing collisions and congestion on the entire LAN. I think of this as the party-line analogy. The switch inspects each incoming packet for the MAC address of the destination device. It then forwards the packet only to the appropriate port. I think of this as the private-line analogy.

My understanding is that the data stream from my IP camera on switch port 1 sending JPGs to my server on port 2 doesn't collide with the data stream from my laptop on port 7 to the router on port 8. The congestion begins when I want to view the JPGs from the server using my laptop. Then Ports 1 and 8 are both trying to connect to port 2, the only port on my server.

I don't understand what the second router does to reduce congestion that the switch didn't already do. Is the router faster than a switch because it operates at layer 3?

 

[DeLicious]

no, but the second router is wireless which allows me to connect wireless cameras... i have yet to see a wireless switch.

 

[Chakara]

Your right on that Photon, for wire speed switches. I doubt that most home units are wire speed, but even then. On a LAN with a handful of Cameras I can't imagine that you would ever have a problem. For enterprise grade stuff you get wire speed switches with VLAN capability and isolate it that way. The only thing I've seen that might flood a network badly enough to need this type of isolation were some very old viruses that weren't smart enough to realize that if they flood the network they will be discovered. That type of stuff seems very rare these days.

For anything I might do in my house - an off the shelf home switch on the same network as the rest of my PC's is fine. I wouldn't recommend that to a business customer . . .