Abdallah Al-Shehri has been chosen as the Best-in-Class Young Researcher by Aramco. Selected from approximately 170 Aramco students pursuing Ph.D.s in the U.S. and around the world, Al-Shehri will be honored at the Aramco EXPEC Advanced Research Center International Advisory Committee Meeting, scheduled for this July in Houston, Texas.

Advised by Professor Ian Akyildiz, Al-Shehri is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and has been a member of the Broadband Wireless Networking Lab since spring 2014. His research topic is “OilMoles: Design of Wireless Underground Self-Contained Sensor Networks for Oil Reservoirs Monitoring.”

The objective of Al-Shehri’s proposed research is to design fully integrated magnetic induction (MI)-based Wireless Underground Sensor Networks (WUSNs) to enable reliable and efficient wireless communications in underground oil reservoirs to perform in-situ monitoring of oil reservoirs. This is very crucial for determining the sweet spot of oil and natural gas reserves, and wireless sensor nodes are a promising technology to collect data from oil reservoirs in real time.

To this end, Al-Shehri is proposing contributions in four areas. First, he is developing a novel cross-layer communication framework for MI-based networks in dynamically changing underground environments that combines a joint selection of modulation, channel coding and power control, a transmitter-based CDMA scheme, and a geographic forwarding paradigm. Second, Al-Shehri is developing a novel MI-based localization framework, which exploits the unique properties of the MI field to determine the locations of the randomly deployed sensor nodes in oil reservoirs.

Third, Al-Shehri is proposing an accurate energy model framework of a linear oil sensor network topology that gives feasible sensors’ transmission rates and sensor network topology while always guaranteeing enough energy. Once that framework is completed, he will design, develop, and fabricate MI-based sensor nodes. Lastly, Al-Shehri will develop a physical MI-based WUSN testbed to validate the performance of the proposed solutions in a practical way as he is going to implement the proposed solutions in the designed MI-based sensor nodes.