Distributed scalable video coding (DSVC) has recently been gaining many attentions due to its benefits in terms of computational complexity, error resilience and scalability, which are important for emerging video applications like wireless sensor networks and visual surveillance system (VSS). In DSVC, the side information (SI) creation plays a key role as it directly affects the DSVC compression performance and the encoder/decoder computational complexity. However, for many VSS applications, the energy of each VSS node is usually attenuating along the time, making the difficulty in transmitting surveillance video in real time. To address this problem, we propose a complexity controlled SI creation solution for the newly DSVC framework. To achieve the flexible SI creation, the complexity associated with SI creation process is modeled using a linear model in which the model parameters are estimated from a fitting process. To adjust the SI complexity, a user parameter is defined based on the availability of the VSS energy resource. Experiments conducted for a rich set of video surveillance data have revealed the benefits of the proposed complexity control solution, notably in both complexity control and compression performance.