Abstract— Acquisition systems for sub-surface diagnostic (for
small earthquake monitoring) and exploration (for new oil and
gas reservior) require a large number of sensors (geophones
or accelerometers) to be deployed in outdoor over large areas
to measure backscattered wave fields. A storage/processing unit
(sink node) collects the measurements from all the geophones
to obtain an image of the sub-surface for real-time analysis
of seismic activity. In-depth imaging quality depends on the
number of sensors deployed and on the position accuracy for
each sensing device. Current connectivity is cable based and
in some cases requires hundreds of kilometers of cabling while
synchronous acquisition is obtained thorugh GPS causing large
power consumption and degradation in accuracy.
Replacing cables with wireless connectivity to create a
wireless geophone network (WGN) is now becoming attractive
to improve the monitoring quality and enable synchronous
monitoring (and self-localization) with minimal use of GPS.
This paper serves as a tutorial to introduce the basic principles
of seismic monitoring systems from a wireless communication
perspective. Specifications for the network architecture and
the MAC layer are proposed to replace the actual cabled systems