We are planning a wireless network for a camera surveillance system. We must upload the image stream of 20 ip cameras to the control center, which is located at 2 km away from the site.
I’m planning 4 ap - the camears will be connected to these, also wirelessly - at the center of the site with 4 pcs of RB532 + R52 cards at 5 GHz and sector antennas. Each camera uses 3-6Mbps bandwidth upward, I hope these boards will be able to handle the max30-30 Mbps segment of the full traffic with WPA encryption. (Is this realistic, or I’m wrong?)
During the reading of the forum at yesterday I’ve realized that the Routerboards are not enough powerful to serve as a wireless backbone for this system.(in worst case the traffic can be reached 120Mbps on the direction to control center) What will be the minimum hardware that required for this purpose? I’ve planned 2 or 3 pcs of 5GHz encrypted link bonded together (also R52’s and 80cm dishes), these will be able to provide the required bandwith?
120Mbps… don’t count on that, definitely forget RB532 and such platforms, you should be using full-blown ATX computers and CPU around 1GHz to be on the safe side (you don’t need 3GHz P4 monsters). You can reach ~100Mbps with several AP/antennas, but you are going to occupy too much frequencies and slight interference will put your camera system out of production. Don’t even think of putting four cards in one server, because you have single point of failure (there is higher probability of system crash with four cards than with one or two and you HAVE TO HAVE reliability here).
I think that for project like yours you should be really considering licensed microwave link or depending on your weather conditions, laser links. I guess stephenpatrick will add something to this shortly but lasers are pretty expensive.
