Microwave Solutions in Oil Industry - Data and Voice Transmission Along Gas Pipes
Microwave Solutions in Oil Industry - Data and Voice Transmission Along Gas Pipes
Data and Voice Transmission Along Gas Pipes
Problem Description
Oil and gas pipelines are a very specific part of industry. Laying fibre optics along a gas pipeline is very risky. In specific conditions, in Siberia for example, permafrost can easily damage the fiber optics cable. Besides that, fiber optics are exposed to civil works, very often taking place along pipelines. Distance between the pipeline and the fiber optics track should be significant in order to avoid the cable from being collateral damage of civil works. Not to mention a case of
explosion, where all installations in a distance of 100 meters from the pipe will melt due to extreme heat produced in the explosion. These are just some of the reasons, why in many cases microwave links are used instead of an optical network.
Proposed Solution
Typically, containers will be designed at each 25 to 50 km along the pipeline. These non-attended sites will not be allocated much bandwidth, since they are intended for interconnection of measurement channels, emergency phone and terrestrial voice radio transmitters. However, approx. each 100 km there should be constructed a larger site with human crew and pipeline operation support. Such locations will provide a more complex communications scheme, such as PABX connectivity, business
network interface, pipeline process control support, etc. All these requirements will be implemented using drop/insert functionality.