Zoneminder as ‘Software as a Service’ and Load Balancing of Video Surveillance Requests

Cloud computing is evolving as a key computing platform for sharing resources that include infrastructures, softwares, applications, and business processes. Virtualization is a core technology for enabling cloud resource sharing. Software as a Service (SaaS) on the cloud platform provides software application vendors a Web based delivery model to serve large amount of clients with multi-tenancy based infrastructure and application sharing architecture so as to get great benefit from the economy of scale. The emergence of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model has attracted great attentions from both researchers and practitioners. SaaS vendors deliver on demand information processing services to users, and thus offer computing utility rather than the standalone software itself.
This paper proposes a deployment of an open source video surveillance application named Zoneminder in a virtualized environment, which is provided as a service to the end users. Virtualization is provided by Oracle VirtualBox in case of the proposed system. The usual goal of virtualization is centralization of administrative tasks besides improving scalability and workloads of the overall system. In this paper, we also propose a load balancing algorithm to balance the computational load on the virtualized resources considering the application provided as a service.