Energy Efficient Network Architecture for Seismic Data Acquisition via Wireless Geophones

Traditional seismic data acquisition systems rely on telemetry cables to conduct oil, gas, and mineral exploration. Although cabled systems provide reliable seismic data transfer, their deployment and maintenance costs are increasing substantially as surveys become larger in scale and densely populated. A novel wireless geophone network architecture is proposed and described in this paper, which makes use of the IEEE 802.11af standard. It operates in the TV White Space, which offers a significantly higher transmission range. A data collection scheme is also proposed and its performance in comparison to the default 802.11 schemes is evaluated on NS-3. The proposed scheme is standards compliant; no changes to the IEEE 802.11af standard are required. The problem of hexagonal clustering for orthogonal deployment of geophones is also considered, and the impact of co-channel interference is analyzed. Furthermore, energy-aware algorithms 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.