1 A Routing Protocol and Addressing Scheme for Oil, Gas, and Water Pipeline Monitoring Using Wireless Sensor Networks Imad Jawhar, Nader Mohamed, Mohamed M. Mohamed, and Junaid Aziz United Arab Emirates University P.O. Box 17551. Al Ain, UAE Phone: +971-3-7135532, Fax: +971-3-7672018 E-mail: {ijawhar, nader.m, m.mohamed, mjunaid}@uaeu.ac.ae Abstract— Wireless sensor networks have a vast amount of applications including environmental monitoring, military, ecology, agriculture, inventory control, robotics and health care. This paper focuses on the area of monitoring, and protection of oil, gas, and water pipelines using wireless sensor networks. ROLS: a ROuting protocol for Linear Structure wireless sensor networks is presented along with a new hierarchical addressing scheme for this type of networking environment. The networking framework and associated protocols are optimized to take advantage of the linear nature of the network to decrease installation, and maintenance cost, decrease energy requirements, increase reliability and improve communication efficiency. In addition, simulation experiments using the proposed model are presented. Keywords: Ad hoc and sensor networks, routing, addressing schemes, wireless networks. I. I NTRODUCTION Research in the field of Wireless Sensor Networks is rela- tively active and involves a number of issues that are being investigated. These issues are efficient routing protocols for ad hoc and wireless sensor networks [9], quality of service (QoS) support [8] [10], security [3], and middleware [5]. Most of these issues are investigated under the assumption that the network used for sensors does not have a predetermined infrastructure. Fortunately, the wireless sensor network needed for pipeline applications will be a structured network in which all sensor nodes will be distributed in a line. This characteristic can be utilized for enhancing the communication quality and reliability in the pipeline systems. This paper addresses the issues and challenges of using wireless sensor networks for monitoring and protection of oil, gas and water pipeline infrastructures. Also, it presents a routing protocol and addressing scheme for this special kind of sensor networks. This architecture utilizes the special linear structure of the networks to solve some of communication reliability and security problems. The objective of the design is to reduce installation and maintenance costs, increase network reliability and fault tolerance, increase battery life for wireless sensors, reduce end-to-end communication delay for QoS This work was supported in part by UAEU Research grant 08-03-9-11/07. sensitive data, and increase network lifetime by utilizing the special linear structure of the network. The paper in [7] presents a framework for using wireless sensor networks for oil, gas, and water pipeline monitoring. This paper extends the model and architecture discussed in [7]. More details on the background, motivation, advantages, and applications for using linear structure wireless sensor networks can be found in that paper. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II discusses the different types of pipelines. Section III presents the networking model overview and hierarchy. Section IV presents the node addressing scheme and routing protocols. Section V presents the simulation and analysis of results. The conclusions and future research are presented in the last section. II. TYPES OF PIPELINES In this paper, the designed framework will be general and can be applied to any types of pipelines with some adaptations to the particular needs and requirements of that type. This section presents the different types of pipelines that can benefit from the application of the framework. [1][2][4][6][11][12]. A. Sub-sea pipeline The ability to monitor flow and pressure build-ups of the multiple phase mixture (oil, gases, brine) through a pipeline in real-time is critical for the safe and efficient transport of fluids. Because pipelines may span many kilometers along the sea bed, normal maintenance procedures at depths of up to 10,000 feet are costly both in time and resources. Failures due to corrosion could cause release of oil and gas, which negatively impacts the environment, causes loss of production, and presented a significant safety hazard. The ability to remotely measure pressure along the entire pipeline is important in the oil and gas industry for the following reasons: 1) Flow problems can be identified more quickly to avoid plugging and catastrophic failure. 2) Maintenance strategy on production wells and pipelines can be shifted from schedule-based to condition-based, resulting in dramatic improvements in efficiency. 3) Hydrocarbon delivery can be maximized.