  Traditional seismic acquisition systems suffer from a number of difficulties
related to telemetry cables that are used as a means of data transmission.
Transforming the traditional seismic acquisition system to a wireless system
has been considered as a potential solution to most of these difficulties. The
wireless seismic acquisition system has to serve a huge aggregate data rate
requirement as is usually the case in a large wireless sensor network. This
paper considers the wireless acquisition system, and studies the maximum
achievable transmission data rates from the geophones to the wireless gateways.
Successive interference cancellation decoding is assumed to be used at the
gateway nodes. We consider the problem of sum-rate maximization by optimizing
the decoding process at each gateway node. The optimization searches for
optimal decoding set at each gateway, i.e. which group of geophones will be
decoded at each gateway. Various integer programming algorithms are proposed
for solving the maximization problem. These optimization algorithms are
simulated and compared among each other, where it is shown that the ant system
algorithm achieves the highest sum-rate with lower computational complexity
compared to other algorithms. Furthermore, the data delivery from the gateways
to the data center is also considered. In this stage, two gateways with
different buffer sizes are studied. For small-size buffers, two optimization
problems are identified and solved. The first problem considers the
minimization of the total power of the gateways, and the second problem
considers power fairness between the gateways. For large-size buffers, the
problem of maximizing the weighted sum rate of the gateways is solved.
