Implementation of a JPEG packetization code for Wireless Sensor Networks in animal monitoring applications

Wireless Sensor Networks applied to animal monitoring faces many challenges. The dense vegetation and high humidity attenuate the wireless transmission path. A solution to this problem is to place the nodes antennas on top of trees and use an unmanned aerial vehicle to collect the data from each node. For small data like sensors readings the transmission is simple. But for the case of images the problem relies on retrieving the complete data. In this scenario retransmission cannot be performed as it drains the battery energy. For this reason a code that can packetize JPEG images into fixed blocks of data is proposed. The code can reconstruct the image on the receiver side even if packets are lost during transmission. The proposed code requires a microcontroller with a minimum RAM of 4 kB. In this research the code is tested on a ESP32 device using the ESP-NOW protocol for its high throughput to transmit the images.