Efficient zero-copy mechanism for intelligent video surveillance networks

¹ School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University, China
² The Shenzhen Key Lab of Advanced Electron Device and Integration, ECE, PKUSZ, China

^* Corresponding author: dgli@pkusz.edu.cn

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.