Case study: the National Roads Telecommunications Services (NRTS) project

However each new communication system, new road or new technology implementation usually required a new and often dedicated network to carry that new service.

In some regions, the cables or fibres needed to be replaced and, generally, there was little spare capacity for expansion. However the greatest issue was the fact that these systems could not communicate and interact with each other, thus neighbouring police authorities could not share data, since they were typically using incompatible analogue systems, often from different manufacturers.

The UK Highways Agency managed and maintained all of these disparate communications networks and admitted that ‘since these networks have evolved in a "piecemeal" fashion to keep pace with the expanding road systems, we now have to manage and maintain 34 separate networks. These networks transmit video, voice and data signals from over 20,000 roadside devices, such as emergency telephones, CCTV cameras including PTZ control, fog & traffic detectors and variable message signs to the 32 Police Control Offices which serve the nation's motorways’.

It was against this background that the Highways Agency conceived the National Roads Telecommunications Services (NRTS) project. The primary aim of the NRTS project is to establish a single approach to the future of the communications network on England's motorway and trunk road network. The key objectives are to increase safety, decrease journey times and increase the information available to the motorist.

The Highways Agency based their requirements for NRTS on the very successful implementation of a networked video surveillance system around the 180Km M25 London Orbital Motorway, supplied by Telindus Surveillance Solutions Ltd in 2002. After adopting this system, the local Police were able to reduce the number of Police Motorway Patrol Vehicles from 9 cars to 5 and re-deploy this resource elsewhere. The police were able to direct the Incident Response Units (IRU) more effectively by giving them an exact location and details of what to expect when they get there, resulting in the IRU attendance time being reduced from 1.5 hours to 20 minutes in 90% of situations.

Following the success of the M25 London Orbital Motorway project, Telindus Surveillance Solutions Ltd was chosen to design, implement and support an IP switched CCTV system for the UK Highways Agency for the NRTS project.

Installation has begun

The NRTS project will provide a national digital system linking more than 4,000 cameras, 14,000 message signs, emergency telephones and traffic monitoring systems to the Highways Agency’s network of traffic control centres. Whilst primarily designed to provide a road safety monitoring system, it will also give drivers real-time travel information to plan their journeys. In addition it will create safer roads, thanks to the nationwide distribution of CCTV footage to travel information organisations and the media. There is also the ability to view all cameras via webcam technology.

Telindus Surveillance Solutions Ltd is responsible for the IP switched video network (CCTV) system, which is comprised almost exclusively of Telindus Surveillance Solutions products, along with solution design and 3rd level support over the 12-year contract period. The Telindus Surveillance Solutions implementation provides the Highways Agency with a fully integrated video surveillance system, which allows real-time images from the roadside to be viewed and recorded across the entire country-wide network. The system gives regional control centres greater visibility of the road network over a wider area, resulting in more effective management of the network and allowing an appropriate and significantly faster response to incidents.

Installation began in May 2007, with live video being recorded and viewed over the network from over 1400 cameras by October 2007.

The Highways Agency has been able to assume primary control of England’s road network, relieving the local police authorities from the time consuming task of traffic monitoring and control. Through the power and scalability of the Telindus management platform, the Highways Agency has been able to converge the 32 Police Control Centres into just 7 Regional Control Centres (RCC), significantly saving on both infrastructure and manpower requirements. These 7 RCCs are able to share video resources allowing the efficient management of incidents (e.g. abnormal loads or vehicles), as they travel from one region to the next.

The Telindus designed CCTV network and management platform also allows any RCC to assume control and management of all systems from a neighbouring RCC, if a total or catastrophic failure should occur at another RCC.

Along with live and recorded video streams, Telindus Surveillance Solutions designed a unique application called WebGate, which runs as a service at each RCC and requests single images from the various networked video recorders (NVR). These images are transcoded from an MPEG-2 I-frame into a JPEG image of any resolution (from QCIF to D1) and exported across a firewall to an external web server. The service can be configured on a per camera basis, allowing the Highways Agency to select the refresh rate of any stream from between 1 image every 2 seconds to 1 image every 5 minutes.

This enables the Highways Authority to offer a webcam style service via the Internet, allowing motorists to view any given camera, anywhere in the country. This service is delivered through the existing Highways Agency NETwork (HANET) service and it is expected that most of the 1400 first phase NRTS cameras will be available via HANET within the next few months.

Another Highways Agency requirement implemented by Telindus Surveillance Solutions is the ability to stream video to external parties outside the NRTS network. This enables the Highways Agency to sell video streams to local and national media groups and motoring organisations, at a range of bandwidths according to the size of the data link available. By using the priority system built into the codecs and managed by the Telindus designed management system, the Highways Agency operators can ensure that they remain in total control of the system and can disconnect any external feeds should a sensitive incident occur. These video feeds will therefore provide ROI revenue, without compromising the security of the NRTS system.

Telindus have modified several of the control components within the system to facilitate this and have already supplied the capability for nearly 250 video streams to be simultaneously sent to external sources for either software or hardware decode.

Largest multi-service network in the UK

The NRTS project is likely to become the largest IP video surveillance installation in the UK, if not Europe for the following reasons:

• Total number of cameras: Currently over 1400 cameras have been installed, but the system was designed to support at least 4,000 primary NRTS cameras and 2,000 additional cameras.
• Size of the multi-service IP network: Whilst the video is only one of seven primary data types on the network, due to the high video quality demanded by the customer and the high number of cameras, the video traffic forms over 98% of the total bandwidth. Therefore, Telindus played a major part in specifying and designing the network, particularly concerning how the video systems would utilise it.
• Total capacity, average and peak bandwidth and number of recorded streams on a single-management distributed IP NVR system: With all cameras being recorded 24 hours per day, a very large part of the system design centred on not only how to record such a large volume of video information, but how to manage and access this information efficiently when required.
• Overall geographical coverage: The system covers all motorways and some major trunk roads in England, which equates to around 3,500Km. The country has been divided into seven main regions, with an RCC in each, extending from the borders with Scotland to the north to the south coast ports and the Channel Tunnel link to mainland Europe.

The entire system is designed to deal with system failures at all levels, from single component failure to the loss of an entire region or RCC. All recording and decoding hardware is capable of running in fully redundant mode for power, network connection and central processing. All software components are configured for redundant operation, allowing every RCC total control over the entire network, with the built-in priority system allowing hierarchical control and partial access rights to lower grade users.

The 32 police control offices, once containing typically 8 or more police officers per room have been replaced with 7 Regional control centres. Each RCC has the capacity for 20 Highways Agency monitoring staff, although typically only 6 to 8 controllers and a single police officer are capable of controller an entire region of the country. This allows the Highways Agency staff to perform the daily monitoring of the road network and then hand over to the regional police if an incident occurs.

Driving the future

In addition to the main NRTS CCTV system, the Highways Agency continues to expand the capabilities of the system and is trialling many new technologies, some of which Telindus Surveillance Solutions is already engaged to supply. Today these initiatives include:

• The continued expansion of the supply of external feeds for rebroadcast by media and motoring organisations, including the broadcasting of both live radio and potentially television pictures directly from the control rooms.
• The HANET service was initially designed and implemented as a subscriber service for the various stakeholders in the nation’s road system. HANET relied on the local encoding of the analogue video systems distributed around the country by taking additional feeds and therefore ports on the analogue matrix switchers. This in turn limited the number of feeds available and also meant that there was a significant cost for adding additional cameras to the system.

Following the initial rollout of NRTS and the Telindus developed WebGate service, the HANET system has been able to expand rapidly from the original and limited service of just under 200 cameras to 400 cameras in a matter of months, with the remainder of the 1400 cameras planned for early 2008. Eventually, through the WebGate service, the HANET system will be able to provide access to all of England’s road cameras. It is also hoped that at least part of this service will be made available to the final stakeholder in the road system – the motorists.

• The Low Cost Camera Initiative (LCCI) is designed to enable the addition of IP connected cameras in areas where the main NRTS network has either yet to be implemented, or due to the low number of roadside network devices, will not be installed. This initiative started with an investigation into the various methods of adding remote cameras and transmitting the video stream back to the nearest ingress point on the main NRTS system, without the cost of extending the main network.

Secondary considerations included removing the need for expensive infrastructure, such as camera poles and roadside cabinets, since it costs the Highways Agency thousands of pounds per day to close a lane on a motorway or trunk road in order to install such items. Instead, the use of existing buildings, lampposts and bridges will lower the costs of installation by providing suitable mounting, power and equipment housing points.

Telindus played a significant role in the investigation and have delivered two systems: one is already installed in the Eastern region, connecting the 10 cameras around Stansted International Airport via WiFi daisy chain link to the main NRTS network. The other will be installed in the north to cover one of the primary roads through the Lake District, using 27 cameras again connected via a WiFi link to the main network. For these cameras, a roadside mounted, hardened single port IP connected codec called the CellStack Solo is used. The Solo is moisture and dust resistance and offers an operating temperature range of -34 to +74 degrees Centigrade.

It is expected that up to 1,000 remote cameras will be installed over the next few years, in addition to the main network cameras. All additional cameras will be recorded on the CellStack Centinel NVR system and be available to all users of the NRTS system, including the HANET webcam system and the Highways Agency’s external video feed system.

• Future extensions include the potential expansion of the current Automatic Traffic Management trial on the M42, where the emergency lane is opened during heavy traffic periods to provide an additional lane. When the emergency lane is opened for public use, then additional cameras must be used to continuously monitor for issues and incidents which may require that the emergency lane be immediately returned to emergency status.

The NRTS system has been designed to be capable of scaling to cover the needs of all current and future users. There are no limits to the number of codecs, NVRs or PC platforms which can be managed by the Telindus software, used to administrate the entire CCTV network. This enables the customer to continue to expand the system to meet any new requirements. This includes the use of current or new technologies, such as ANPR, video analytics, incident detection systems or other 3rd party devices, enabling the Highways Agency to realise their target of safer roads, with reduced journey times.

South East Regional Control Centre. Each RCC can accomodate 20 operators and 2 supervisors, all with both local video decode and control over the main videowall, although only 6 operators and 1 supervisor are needed to control and entire region.