Below are some of the advantages and disadvantages of using a VPN while live streaming video and GPS from the geoDVR.
Disadvantages
– Depending on the security protocol and encryption, VPN’s can add additional overhead and increase latency, especially with the video streams you will be viewing. Also, depending on where the encryption/decryption occurs, the hardware resource requirements of the devices and servers can increase substantially. This can be alleviated if the VPN is integrated via a hardware solution in your datacenter, although due to the shear bandwidth required for streaming video and GPS data, there is already a large overhead and VPNs unfortunately add to this overhead requirement.
– Complexity – Ideally, the VPN is fairly transparent and easy to connect to. However, they do add an additional layer of potential complexity that can cause issues, especially during debugging and troubleshooting devices connected to them.
– Reliability – Since the VPN is adding potential overhead, connectivity loss (along with latency as mentioned above) is a concern, especially when trying to stream video and GPS over cell connections. The Remote Geo Live Stream Server tries to accommodate some latency, although stream timeouts (and thus dropped connections) are possible if the VPN introduces extra latency and/or causes connectivity loss.
Advantages
– Depending on the setup, VPNs typically allow all devices to be on the same subnet. This can make video stream routing much easier.
– Security – With the encryption capabilities of most VPN, they typically add a much greater layer of security.