Monitoring of Gas Distribution Pipelines Network Using Wireless Sensor Networks

The Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) usually consist of several wirelessly connected sensors, to accumulate the data from some geographically scattered field and communicate it to a central database. Thus WSNs become an expedient tool to monitor the widespread gas distribution network such as Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Ltd. Pakistan. In this paper, some routing protocols performance has been investigated for gas pipeline monitoring applications. Simulated comparison of various routing protocols for WSNs deployed over gas distribution pipeline networks can give a valuable insight into the workability of the system, its performance, and other critical design parameters. The estimated lifetime of the network, node deployment for encyclopedic operation, the impact of energy harvesting from the field, and placement of the sink node at an optimal location are the key issues in the design of the WSN for pipeline network monitoring. All these issues are studied through simulation of various protocols for WSNs based upon real geographic locations of the nodes, real-world power levels and power consumptions by various processes of the wireless sensor networks. The simulations results show that DDEEC based WSN, for monitoring an actual Gas Distribution Network with a substantial quantity of nodes, can run with about 99.9% alive nodes for a benchmark period of 10 years. It was also evident from the comparison of the simulation results that the routing protocol DDEEC based system performs 0.4 to 34% better than the system based on LEACH, SEP, DEEC, and its other variants.