Cross-Layer Design and Analysis of Wireless Geophone Networks Utilizing TV White Space

Traditional seismic data acquisition systems used for surveying during the exploration of oil and gas rely on cables between geophones and the data collection center. Despite the fact that cable-based systems provide reliable seismic data transfer, their deployment and maintenance costs increase substantially as the survey area increases in scale. Therefore, a three layer wireless network architecture is proposed in this work, which consists of wireless geophones (WG) and a data center with an intermediate wireless gateway node (WGN). This paper investigates the aggregate data throughput, transmission time, and energy consumption from WGs to the WGN in a wireless geophone network architecture based on the IEEE 802.11af standard. This standard is considered in order to have the maximum possible range and low power consumption due to operating in TV bands. Analytical expressions of the aforementioned quantities are derived using Markov chain models. Two Markov models are considered for this purpose: one for modeling the access method that allows multiple WGs to connect to a WGN and the other for representing a buffer in a WG. Since seismic data is recorded at regular intervals, arrivals of data packets in the buffer of the WG is deterministic. On the other hand, departure is random due to the multiple access method. Hence, in this work D/M/1/B queue is used for the first time to model the buffer in a wireless geophone. Furthermore, the physical layer constraints are also taken into account together with proper wireless path-loss channel models. The results obtained are useful for designing such wireless seismic networks without extensive simulations. In particular, the proposed joint medium access control, physical layer, and D/M/1/B model enables us to optimize the required number of WGNs. Finally, sectoring is also introduced in order to minimize the total number of WGNs needed to cover the whole surveying area.