An Energy-Efficient IEEE 802.11ad Mesh Network for Seismic Acquisition

Abstract

Modern seismic surveys can obtain subsurface images of superior quality and depth, albeit requiring wireless acquisition systems to keep up with higher data rate requirements. Data communication protocols have been studied primarily for links between the geophones and the gateway nodes, leaving a dearth of analysis for the communication links between the gateway nodes and the sink node. In this paper, a novel wireless geophone network architecture based on the IEEE 802.11ad standard is proposed with the objective of providing gigabit rates in order to support real-time seismic acquisition. A performance analysis reveals that the latency and power consumption are dependent on the ratio of the data generation rate to the data transfer rate. An additional Power-Saving Geophone Relay (PSGR) scheme is described, which exploits idle periods of operation to conserve power at the cost of an increased latency. The trade-off between the latency and power consumption under the PSGR scheme is evaluated for a variety of scenarios in seismic acquisition.