Towards the underwater internet of things for subsea oil and gas monitoring

Abstract

The oil and gas industry (O&G) is at the forefront of significant social change as the world aligns itself with the 2050 Net Zero agenda. The Underwater Internet of Things (UIoT) will inevitably be part of this process across a broad range of applications from monitoring pollutant emissions to enabling proactive maintenance of pipelines through robotics. The goal of this survey is to discuss the current and future technologies of UIoT regarding communications, networking, sensing and computational technologies and how it will address challenges that the O&G is facing. Firstly, a brief discussion on subsea assets is carried out. After, the propagation and physical characteristics of common underwater communications technologies are discussed in depth and how they relate to effective transmission of data. Additionally, this discussion of communication is followed by another on networking through analysis of the three layers of the protocol stack most affected by the change in transmission media, the physical, datalink and network layers. After this discussion, an example investigation is presented on a simulated network to support O&G UIoT with a proceeding introduction to the available simulation tools for designing subsea networks. then, research challenges of the UIoT in the O&G are identified. Finally, the trends in UIoT research are discussed regarding their relevance to O&G as well as concluding remarks.