LVFS: A Lightweight Video Storage File System for IP Camera-Based Surveillance Applications

Surveillance video data are characterized by a high-volume write-oriented workload and cyclic use of storage space at full capacity. Besides, the video data needs indexing to support accurate-query. Data archiving for such applications, however, is complicated by the increasing demands of higher-resolution cameras and longer video-retention times. Due to the constant data steaming and nearly 100% write activity, general-purpose file systems will not suffice for present purposes. Thus, we specially design and implement a lightweight video storage file system (LVFS) for IP camera-based surveillance applications. LVFS provides a recycled storage platform to meet the retention requirement of surveillance applications, and delivers high performance for concurrent stream data uploading from multiple cameras and accurate data retrieval. Results of a multi-workload experiment show that LVFS is able to archive 40 HD or 16 full-HD cameras for an individual hard disk while processing nearly constant time queries, indicating that LVFS successfully fits the system requirement and performs better than general-purpose file system.