SimpliMote: A Wireless Sensor Network Monitoring Platform for Oil and Gas Pipelines

• Published in: IEEE systems journal Vol. 12; no. 1; pp. 778 - 789
• Main Authors: Ali, Salman, Ashraf, Adnan, Qaisar, Saad Bin, Kamran Afridi, Muhammad, Saeed, Husnain, Rashid, Sidra, Felemban, Emad A., Sheikh, Adil Amjad
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.03.2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Actuation; Coverage; Data acquisition; Gas pipelines; leak detection; Manufacturing; Monitoring; Natural gas; Network reliability; Oils; Petroleum pipelines; Pipelines; Protocol (computers); Remote sensors; Resource allocation; Routing; Sensors; Wireless networks; wireless sensor network; Wireless sensor networks; ZigBee
• ISSN: 1932-8184; 1937-9234
• DOI: 10.1109/JSYST.2016.2597171

Wireless sensor networks have extensively been utilized over the years for ambient data collection from diverse structural deployments including mesh, ad hoc , and hierarchical layouts. Several other applications of sensor networks may involve placing the nodes in a linear topology, constituting a special class of networks called linear sensor networks. In a densely deployed linear network case, issues related to optimal resource allocation and networking may persist because the standard sensor network protocols attempt to manage the network as a mesh or ad hoc infrastructure. Issues like recovering from holes where a node cannot reach another node in either side or policies to establish a route for data dissemination need to be intelligently solved for linear sensor networks. To solve such issues, we propose a linear sensor network deployment application for oil and gas pipeline using a custom sensor board accompanied with algorithms to solve network creation, leak interrupt detection, and routing of high-priority messages with reliability while keeping network alive at all times. The proposed system provides all the features of leakage detection, localization, parameter sensing, and actuation, while operating at low energy, high data reliability, and low latencies, while comparative results prove the efficacy of the system.