Camera Bandwidth

Topics included in this article:

• Network Flow
• Bandwidth Requirements
• Bandwidth Reporting
• Variable Bitrate
• Minimize Bandwidth Consumption
  • Reduce AI Detections
    • Utilize Activity Regions
  • Optimize Bit Rate and Resolution
  • Reduce the Number of Active Streams
  • Manage Cloud Upload Time
  • Schedule Firmware Updates
• Video Delay when Streaming
• Video Streaming
• Local Recording
• Cloud Recording & Policy Events
• Offline Mode
• Helpful Links
• Contact Support or Sales

Network Flow

Figure 1.) Diagram illustrating a general network flow. 

Bandwidth Requirements

The bandwidth used when live streaming a camera depends on the amount of motion and type of camera. 

Note: This bandwidth is only taken when a camera is being actively streamed.  Otherwise, the upload bandwidth consumption is 10 - 30 Kbps during regular operation for the Rhombus cameras. For the Audio gateway, the upload bandwidth consumption is 2 – 10 Kbps during normal operation. If the camera is being streamed locally, no WAN bandwidth is consumed as all streaming occurs over the LAN.

Bandwidth Reporting

Device Page

You can view the bandwidth usage of any camera by navigating to the camera, selecting the "Historical Data" tab, and scrolling down slightly.

Home Page

You can view the average camera bandwidth on the Home dashboard under "Reports."

Logs and Reports Page

Under the "Logs and Reports" tab, you can select "Bandwidth." Here you can compare different cameras and select a time range to view upload and download. 

Variable Bitrate

Rhombus is committed to ensuring the lowest possible bandwidth consumption on customers' networks while maintaining the highest possible video quality. We have implemented the use of smart VBR (variable bit rate), which enables the cameras to greatly reduce bandwidth consumption when there is little change or motion in the camera field of view. 

Minimize Bandwidth Consumption

Although Rhombus cameras are designed to consume as little bandwidth as possible, you may find that your cameras consume more bandwidth than anticipated. This section will cover a few ways to minimize bandwidth consumption.

Reduce AI Detections

The most effective way to minimize bandwidth consumption from your Rhombus devices is by reducing the types and amounts of AI detections enabled on your cameras. Each AI detection feature can consume a different amount of bandwidth. The chart below indicates the general level of bandwidth consumption generated by each detection. 

Utilize Activity Regions

By default, AI detection features will search a camera's full FoV to identify movement events. Activity regions allow you to highlight the relevant areas of a camera's FoV to limit the AI detections to the highlighted area. If human movement detection is enabled on a camera that has a busy street in the background, an Activity Region can reduce bandwidth consumption as the camera will only search in the relevant areas within a camera's FoV. 

See our article on Configuring Activity Regions for more details.

Optimize Bit Rate and Resolution

A camera's bit rate and resolution settings can significantly impact the amount of bandwidth they consume. Reducing bit rate and image resolution can help minimize bandwidth consumption. 

Reduce the Number of Active Streams

Reducing the number of active streams is another great way to minimize bandwidth consumption. If multiple users view different points of footage from the same camera at the same time, that camera will produce multiple streams and, therefore, use additional bandwidth. Adjusting user permissions to ensure only the necessary users have access to historical footage will help with minimizing bandwidth consumption. See our article on Role Creation and Management for more information.

Video walls can be another source of unexpected bandwidth consumption. Video walls will pull multiple cameras' live streams into one viewer. This means that when viewing a video wall, multiple video streams will be actively using bandwidth. 

Manage Cloud Upload Time

Managing when your cameras upload footage to the cloud won't change overall bandwidth consumption but can reduce the pressure on your network during high-usage times.

Note: Editing the cloud upload time will delay when footage is transferred to the cloud. Therefore, all historical footage may not be in the cloud should a camera lose power/network connection.

Schedule Firmware Updates

Scheduling firmware updates outside of your normal high-usage times won't reduce overall bandwidth consumption but will reduce the pressure on your network during those times. 

Video Delay when Streaming

Many IP camera solutions struggle with live HD video streaming.  The Rhombus solution offers near real-time with an average latency of the below stats depending on where you are streaming:

 < 200 milliseconds on LAN (local network streaming)

 < 500 milliseconds on WAN (remote streaming)

The actual performance can vary depending on the number of cameras being streamed concurrently, the distance from those cameras, and the available bandwidth on the network.

Video Streaming

Each camera comes with an embedded microSD card which serves as the primary storage mechanism for all video data. When a user wants to view either live or past footage, it is streamed directly from the camera to the user’s viewing device. The exact mechanics vary depending on whether the viewer and the camera are on the same LAN, but there is no configuration required to make both work seamlessly. The video player automatically detects the network.

• LAN: When on any network where the private IP address of a camera is routable from a user’s laptop or mobile device (so not strictly on the same LAN), the video player will automatically stream video directly from the camera instead of going out through the internet. This means that no internet bandwidth will be consumed, and the video feed will experience extremely low latency. The connection to the camera will take place over port 8000.
• WAN: On an outside network instead of going directly to the camera, which would require ingress ports to be opened up in a firewall, video streaming is proxied through our geo-distributed Video Streaming servers. Each camera initiates and maintains a persistent connection to a server on port 443, while the video player makes its own connection to the same server. Video content is then piped between the player and camera, with the server acting as a tunnel. Bandwidth used over the WAN typically averages between 120 and 1400 Kbps depending on the camera type and resolution.

Regardless of LAN or WAN, streaming is performed over a low-level web socket connection. A custom, lightweight, binary protocol is used to control the data flow and keep data transmission as efficient as possible. While streaming live footage, our cameras automatically detect transmission speeds and will adapt the video quality based on the consumption speed of the video player.