Wireless Backhaul Strategies for Real-Time High-Density Seismic Acquisition

Modern geophysics methods for oil and gas exploration are able to generate subsurface images of superior quality and depth, albeit making real-time data acquisition a more challenging task. While current literature addresses data transfer issues primarily between the geophones and the gateway nodes, a communication scheme for the transfer of data from the gateway nodes to the sink largely remains unsolved. A novel wireless geophone network architecture for seismic data acquisition is described, with the objective of eliminating cable-based systems and providing Gigabit rates in order to support real-time acquisition. A performance analysis is conducted for various mesh networks employing IEEE 802.11ac, IEEE 802.11ad, and free space optical communication, from the geophysics perspective. Our findings suggest that the bottleneck links can be shifted from the top to the bottom of existing architectures, and a scalable approach requiring minimal number of gateway devices can be designed for high-density seismic surveys.