An energy-efficient channel access protocol for wireless seismic data acquisition

Abstract

Traditional seismic acquisition systems are dependent on the use of cables for conducting oil and gas exploration. Although cabled systems provide reliable seismic data transfer, they suffer from high maintenance and logistics costs. A novel wireless geophone network architecture is described in this thesis, which makes use of the IEEE 802.11af standard. By operating in television white space bands, a significantly high transmission range is obtained. A data collection scheme is also proposed and its performance is evaluated in comparison to the default IEEE 802.11 channel access schemes. The proposed Geophone-Polling (GP) scheme is standards-compliant, thereby facilitating wireless acquisition in seismic surveys with off-the-shelf hardware. The problem of hexagonal clustering for orthogonal deployment of geophones is also considered, and the impact of co-channel interference is analyzed. Furthermore, power-saving schemes are analyzed to extend the battery life of the geophones. The proposed scheme outperforms the default standard in terms of both throughput and power consumption, and provides a realistic solution for deploying large-scale wireless geophone networks.