Compression and coding for cable-free land acquisition systems

Abstract

The use of cable-free equipment in land acquisition systems is one of the most promising technological breakthroughs toward the minimization of operating costs in high-density surveys. Even if solutions based on remote data storage with some quality data control are reaching a good degree of maturity, their limitations compared to cabled systems are now recognized as unacceptable in land operations. Wireless upload of the entire seismic dataset (or part of it) while shooting is the most challenging task of future generation cable-free systems. Data compression and coding before transmitting over the wireless medium is of strategic importance to reduce the data rate per seismic channel. We have designed data compression systems tailored for cable-free acquisitions. Cable-free receivers are connected by multihop topology so that the encoding of seismic traces optimally exploits the temporal and spatial coherence of data to maximize redundancy. Synthetic and real data are used to simulate the compression settings to evaluate their benefits. Finally, we also discuss the impact of the distortion on signal introduced by the wireless channel fluctuations.