US Patent 7668118 Directional topology discovery for downhole networks

Patent 7668118 was granted and assigned to IntelliServ on February, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Overview Structured Data Issues Contributors Activity

Is a

Patent

Patent attributes

Current Assignee

IntelliServ

Patent Jurisdiction

United States Patent and Trademark Office

Patent Number

7668118

Date of Patent

February 23, 2010

Patent Application Number

12019865

Date Filed

January 25, 2008

Patent Primary Examiner

‌

Hong Cho

Patent abstract

An apparatus and method for discovering and monitoring a collection of nodes in a downhole network may include receiving data packets originating from several downhole nodes. These packets may be read to extract a unique identifier and hop count for each of the nodes. This information may then be used to create entries in a network topology table corresponding to each of the downhole nodes. Each entry may contain unique identifier identifying the respective node, a hop count identifying a location of the node within the downhole network, and a direction identifier. The method may further include modifying one or more entries in the topology table having a conflicting hop count and direction identifier.