Wireless Sensor Networks for Off-shore Oil and Gas Installations

Underwater development and production of oil and gas needs networked sensors and actuators to monitor the production process, to either prevent or detect oil and gas leakage or to enhance the production flow and yield of the wells. Sensors used today are large and expensive, both to manufacture and to deploy sub-sea. We suggest sensor networks created by inexpensive and small wireless sensor nodes in a redundant multi-hop topology. Preliminary designs and results are shown for two such nodes using ultrasound and infrared light as wireless commutation.