A Novel and Efficient Algorithm for Deploying Mobile Sensors in Subsurface

Abstract

The demand for oil is growing steadily from emerging and developing economies while oil field discoveries continue to decline. Therefore the gap between demand and supply will increase with time. Subsurface Exploration deals with extracting valuable hydrocarbons from oil wells. Due to its hazardous nature, it’s one of the most difficult fields to carry experimentations on. Uncertainties associated with this field are result of various factors such as lack of information regarding location, size and spread of natural resource. In order to handle above listed factors, mobile wireless sensors seems to be a promising paradigm for increasing productivity and throughput by serving as intelligent investigators. At the time of this listing, none of the researchers have proposed the deployment of mobile wireless sensors in the oil fields. Therefore, this work contributes a unique strategy that could deploy mobile sensors in the subsurface so as to get real time information which otherwise is not possible. Moreover, the proposed algorithm provides efficient coverage and connectivity metric. Also, a mathematical model has been presented along with its comparison with other existing node placement strategies in other related fields and it is found that our algorithm provides better coverage and connectivity.

Keywords: Wireless Sensor Networks, Subsurface Exploration, Sensor Deployment