A new AODV-based routing protocol adequate for monitoring applications in oil & gas production environments

Monitoring applications in onshore oil and gas production environments are usually based on wireless solutions. Most part of nowadays applications rely upon outdated technologies, based on the use of analog radios and inefficient master-slave communication topologies. In this paper, we investigate the use of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies to monitor oil and gas production environments. More specifically, we consider a mesh topology for the communication network and we analyze the performance of three different routing algorithms: the classic AODV algorithm, an hierarchical routing algorithm and our own proposed version of a simplified AODV. A simulation assessment of these 3 algorithms is done using the Network Simulator NS-2, upon data from a real topology of onshore oil wells monitoring.