SSTV Based IoT Data Acquisition and Analytics for Remote Regions

This paper aims at the creation of a reliable system for data acquisition and transmission in remote regions that will alleviate the issues caused due to lacking internet connectivity in said regions. In order to tackle this issue, the proposed system aims at sending acquired data (consisting of for instance environmental data pertaining to the said remote region) over the Very High Frequency (VHF) Amateur Radio frequency band, to a region with adequate internet connectivity, so that the data can subsequently be sent to a cloud platform for further analysis. By doing so, the proposed system aims at offering the benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT) to regions with unsatisfactory or nonexistent internet connectivity. This system plans on employing Slow Scan Television: a technique whose principle is to transmit image (Gray scale and Color) as audio signals by employing the mathematical principle of conversion of temporal domain signal to spectral domain. The environmental data collected is recorded in the form of a Slow Scan Television image embedded with textual sensor data. This image is then encoded using an SSTV encoder and transmitted. At the receiving end (a facility with satisfactory internet connectivity), the SSTV audio is converted back into an image using an SSTV decoder. The text in the image is then extracted and is sent to a cloud platform for further analysis. SSTV encodes images line-by-line, resulting in an audio lasting a few minutes. This is ideally suited for transmitting data that does not require samples in quick succession. Further, SSTV facilitates the transmission of pictorial data as well, hence paving the way for expansion of this system.