Irvine in Orange County, California, was incorporated in 1971 and is one of the United States’ largest planned urban communities, encompassing more than 65 square miles. One of the main ways the city is keeping its 200,000 citizens moving is through the use of traffic surveillance cameras and advanced traffic controllers deployed at its 300+ intersections, with another 200 intersections being planned.
Like many cities and transportation agencies around the world, the City of Irvine had a complex problem: how do you take disparate, incompatible communication systems and migrate them all on to one open, standards-based network? At the end of 1997 the City of Irvine faced this challenge head-on. There were six primary areas of concern driving the convergence:
– Core network – ATM with LAN Emulation (LANE)
– Analogue video switching
– Video surveillance – home-run, dedicated fibre, copper, and wireless links for CCTV
– Traffic controllers – proprietary FSK modems using copper twisted pair
– Traffic signal management – proprietary central traffic control system
– Redundancy/resilience – all systems were a “single point of failure”
Network challenge
Irvine’s first hurdle involved its existing ATM network core. Managers at the city were concerned that as a standard, manufacturers were finding ATM more difficult to support. So they decided to completely migrate their network core to an Ethernet solution and chose the Cisco Catalyst 3750 series for the core moving data at rates up to 10 Gbps. The network edge, with switches in every traffic signal cabinet, is driven by the Cisco Catalyst 2955, which is a temperature hardened layer 2/3 switch for rates up to 1 Gbps. This approach gave the city a number of advantages, including:
– One protocol from edge to core
– Reduced network node cost
– Improved scalability
– Increased bandwidth capability
– Interoperable network components based on Ethernet
So as Irvine’s network grew, adding new capabilities was simply a matter of ensuring Ethernet connectivity controllers came in the shape of Siemens 2070 Lite with integrated Ethernet connectivity. For networked video transmission, Optelecom-NKF C-15 video encoders and decoders were selected.
Specific to the video surveillance portion of Irvine’s network, there was a need to replace the previous technology: dedicated fibre point-to-point runs moving baseband video signals to the Traffic Management Centre. So video camera signals are compressed using Optelecom-NKF C-15 codecs capable of networking video at multiple rates using MPEG-2. These temperature hardened codecs equipped the city with high-quality video without the need for dedicated transmission paths. By connecting them to field Ethernet switches, any video signal was made available users using both hardware and software decoding, as long as network connectivity and IP addresses were available.
“Converging all of our communications requirements onto a common platform presented a real challenge,” comments Thomas Roberts, senior project manager for the City of Irvine. “The benefits of our Ethernet-based system have far exceeded our expectations in terms of performance, reliability, redundancy, and expandability. Optelecom-NKF has been an integral partner. Not only do their products work well for us, but we have come to appreciate their high level of service and proactive support.”
Users at Irvine believe their Ethernet network architecture will provide them with unparalleled expandability, freedom from proprietary solutions, and will ease integration of future technologies. The intelligent transportation industry in general is quickly realising what IT professionals discovered long ago: Ethernet and IP make a perfect platform for converging disparate communications systems into a unified, manageable, open solution.
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