The state of the art of surveillance systems include a large set of techniques for both low level and high level tasks. In particular, the research community has witnessed in the last decade a high proliferation of techniques that span from object detection and tracking to object recogni- tion and event understanding. Although some techniques have been proven to be very effective those tasks cannot be considered solved. Although more effort is needed in the event analysis field, a new problem arises from the develop- ment of large scale networked surveillance systems: infor- mation sharing. The way information is shared between the nodes of the surveillance network today represents a key- point issue. To provide a first and novel solution to such a problem, we propose an innovative system architecture for a video surveillance system with distributed processing over multiple processing units and with distributed communica- tion over multiple heterogeneous channels (wireless, satel- lite, local IP networks, etc.). In particular, a new real-time technique for changing the video transmission parameters (e.g., frame rate, spatial/color resolution, etc.) according to the bandwidth available will be here presented.