Traffic-Aware Video Streaming Topology Reconfiguration for Smart City Applications

The smart city is a concept with AI-enabled applications introduced to mitigate challenges in modern urban areas. At the same time, many cameras are being installed inside the city for a wide range of applications. But AI applications face a significant challenge in ensuring data quality as the system scale rapidly grows. With the scale of the smart city today, communication models like the broker-based model and the brokerless communication model both have their own challenges. This paper introduces a reconfigurable architecture to overcome the limitations of each model. Our goal is to provide better video data quality while one or both of the communication models meet their bandwidth limitations. The applications simply need to request the desired video data, then the proposed architecture will predict the optimal one of two communication models at runtime and deliver the data with it. The proposed architecture has a quality detector for predicting service quality and a reconfigurable method for switching communication models. We tested the proposed architecture by comparing it with the case that only adapts the broker-based model. The result indicates that the proposed architecture can provide better quality of video data at peak hours. And during the experiment, we also confirm the positive side effect that the proposed architecture can bring improvement to other traffic.