A method and apparatus for data communication in an
oil well environment, wherein the method comprises detecting an acoustic
signal transmitted along an acoustic channel, the acoustic
signal being distorted from transmission through the acoustic channel, generating a transmitted
data signal in response to the acoustic
signal, inputting the transmitted
data signal to an
adaptive equalizer and adaptively equalizing the transmitted
data signal to produce an equalized data signal related to the transmitted data signal by a mathematical function. The detecting step may include positioning an acoustic
receiver in a
communication unit along the acoustic channel. The
communication unit may be positioned downhole and the
adaptive equalizer may be positioned remotely relative to the
communication unit or may be placed in the communication unit. The
adaptive equalizer may be a
frequency domain filter, a neural net adaptive
equalizer or a nonlinear recurrent neural net
equalizer. The acoustic signal may comprise a plurality of discrete transmissions which may be a training sequence for training the adaptive
equalizer and may comprise a first discrete transmission transmitted repeatedly.The method of data communication in an
oil well environment may comprise the steps of transmitting an acoustic signal from a first location along an acoustic channel, detecting the acoustic signal at a second location along the acoustic channel, generating a transmitted data signal in response to the acoustic signal, inputting the transmitted data signal to an adaptive equalizer and adaptively equalizing the transmitted data signal to produce an equalized data signal related to the transmitted data signal by a mathematical function. The transmitting step may further comprise positioning an acoustic
transmitter in a first communication unit along the acoustic channel downhole or elsewhere. The method may further comprise acquiring data, generating an
original data signal in response to the acquired data and inputting the
original data signal to the acoustic
transmitter. The acoustic signal may comprise a series of acoustic training signals for training the adaptive equalizer. The acoustic training signals may be transmitted at a predetermined time. A stored training signal may include a series of stored training data signals corresponding to the series of acoustic training signals. At least a portion of the stored training signals may be cross-correlated to the transmitted data signal. The acoustic signal may comprise a notification signal for notifying the adaptive equalizer of a training session.