Synchronous ultra-wide band wireless sensors networks for oil and gas exploration

Abstract— The fluctuations of the price of crude oil is pushing the oil companies to increase the investments in seismic exploration of new oil and gas reservoir. Seismic exploration requires a large number (500 ÷ 2000 nodes/sqkm) of sensors (geophones or accelerometers) to be deployed in outdoor over large areas (≥ 20 sqkm) to measure backscattered wave fields. A storage/processing unit (sink node) collects the measurements from all the geophones to obtain an image of the sub-surface in real-time. Current connectivity is cable based and requires hundreds of kilometers of cabling causing delays, high logistic costs and low imaging quality. This paper serves as a tutorial to introduce the basic principles of seismic acquisition systems from a wireless communication perspective and provides a number of requirements/specifications for the physical, MAC and network layer to develop wireless sensors networks tailored for oil (and gas) exploration. The Wireless Geophone Network (WGN)...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ISCC
• Authors: Stefano Savazzi, Umberto Spagnolini
• Keywords: Communications, ISCC 2009, Oil Companies, Seismic Acquisition, Seismic Exploration