Channel and energy analysis on magnetic induction-based wireless sensor networks in oil reservoirs

AbstractThe networks of micro-sized wireless sensors willenable the in-situ monitoring in the challenging oil reservoir environments,which can significantly increase the current recoveryfactor of crude oil and natural gas. However, due to the microdevice size defined by the environmental structure and the harshwireless channel in the complicated dense media, traditionalwireless communication and networking solutions do not work inoil reservoirs. To address the problems, in this paper, the systemarchitecture and operational framework of a Magnetic Induction(MI)-based wireless sensor network is proposed, where both thewireless energy transfer and the wireless communications in theoil reservoir environments are realized by the magnetic inductiontechnique. More importantly, the wireless channel model andthe energy transfer/consumption model of such networks areanalytically developed to validate the feasibility of the proposedsystem architecture and operational framework.5 Halama