A new type of network architecture – Wireless Optical Mesh – makes video surveillance viable in outdoor environments.

In post-9/11 America, we’ve become more comfortable smiling for the cameras in airports, parking garages, lobbies, schools – anywhere that security threats might arise. And now the owners of these facilities are making massive investments in state-of-the-art security technologies, to the tune of $6 billion in 2006 alone, according to strategic consulting firm A4 International.

The ideal security system, according to both security and technology experts, is a single, powerful network infrastructure that maintains live video surveillance centrally, along with other sophisticated applications. With centralized video surveillance, security personnel can monitor video streams from many dispersed cameras in real time. Even more important, video-analytics software can rapidly evaluate threats that appear in any of the video streams and even respond to them automatically.