The Need

The Municipality of Venaria Reale, close to Torino in the northern Region of Piemonte, had a very specific need: to implement a video surveillance project for the security of its own citizens. The need was to install a number of digital videocameras, each one distant many kilometers from the eachother, with the purpose of surveilling large public areas, and of transmitting the immages from the cams to local police authorities.

The Key Aspects were:

• to have an ultra broadband for data transmission in streaming mode
• to coverage of a vast territory
• secure data transmission
• flexibility for new installments
• Internet for citizens in the future



The solution

In 2008 the first part of the backbone with 12 nodes was developed and installed. On the network, 16 Full HD digital videocameras were connected by Mangrovia’s Mesh nodes, with a real throughput of 55Mbit/s per node. In 2009 new Mangrovia Box Nodes were added, and some parts of the Mesh Network were also connected to fibre optic cables.

Moreover, at the end of 2009, the Municipality decided to use the same Network for more services and to give free Internet to the citizens in some pubblic areas. The project is soon expected to increase of about 10 more Mesh Nodes.

The advantages of using a sustainable technology

The strategy chosen by the Municipality of Venaria has a double advantage in terms of sustainable growth. As a matter of fact, on one side the Municipality decided to concentrate on a new technology which was still not very known and used in Italy. On the other hand, the idea was to take advantage of the potentials shown by opensource, and to choose an open protocoll promoted by Mangrovia.Net in Italy. Open source solutions are notably less expensive compared to proprietary solutions, and, at the same time, technologically still very valid, as shown by the development of open source technology in the world in the past years.

Regarding Mesh Networks, the opensource protocol OLSR is one of the few IETF (RFC 3626) standards, tested on more than 2500 nodes and on more than 50 different devices.

Mesh technology is probably the cheapest way today for developing a broadband Municipality Network.