Evaluation of IEEE 802.11 Ad hoc-Based Wireless Seismic Data Acquisition Networks

This paper investigates the performance of a proposed IEEE 802.11 ad hoc-based wireless seismic data acquisition (WSDA) network architecture. The study centers on examining the network performance in the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands with focus on addressing WSDA challenges such as scalability, reliability, self-configuration and organization, interference effects, and latency. Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is used as the enabling routing protocol employing the multiple Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (multi-DODAG) architecture. OMNeT++ discrete event simulator is used to evaluate the network performance, using metrics such as packet delivery ratio (PDR), end-to-end delay (E2ED), packet error rate (PER), retransmission ratio, packet dropped, etc. Results show that the proposed network architecture is scalable and reliable with large number of geophones in the network. In addition, Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) proves to be a suitable candidate to enable self-configuration and organization in multi-hop ad hoc WSDA networks.