Soft Decision Decoding

in Mud Pulse Telemetry System

Andrey Ivanov1 , Dmitry Lakontsev2 , Alexey Fisenko3 , and Alexander Ushakov4
1,2
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russia
3,4
Geomash, Tyumen, Russia
an.ivanov@skoltech.ru, d.lakontsev@skoltech.ru, fisenko@groupgeo.ru, ushakov@groupgeo.ru

Abstract—In this paper, we propose a new probabilistic decod- direction into the formation which contains the oil, gas, water
ing method for the measurement-while-drilling telemetry system. or condensate.
The mud pulse telemetry system transmits the data from inside
a borehole to the surface during drilling operations. The mud
pulser is equipped with a mechanical valve, which partly shuts
the mud stream for a short time, realizing modulation. The system
modulates the drilling mud in the well, creating pressure pulses,
which are sampled on the pressure sensor at the surface pump and
further decoded into digital data. In our method, each detected
pulse is assigned with reliability, calculated from informative
pulse measures (rising edge slope, duration and delay to the
previous pulse). Knowing a set of possible information packet
lengths and reliability for each detected pulse, one can apply soft-
decision decoding to extract information with higher probability.
This approach is similar to the Viterbi soft decoder, but in our
case information is not encoded. The algorithm was implemented
and validated in real wells. Field tests demonstrate 32 percent
reduction in packet error rate in the real-life well on the 8750
meters depth borehole.
Index Terms—IoT; measurement-while-drilling; mud-pulse
telemetry; soft decoding

I. I NTRODUCTION

Drilling rigs are employed to make a well (also called a

borehole or wellbore) in the earth’s surface to extract natural
resources, for example, gas or oil. As drilling has become more
complex [1], with horizontal and directional drills increasing
in numbers, well logging has also had to adapt and improve.
Measurement while drilling (MWD, [2]) is a type of well log-
ging that incorporates the measurement tools into the drillstring
and provides real-time information to help with steering the
drill as shown in Fig. 1. MWD system monitors both geo-
logical parameters (hydrogen content, gamma ray emissions,
soil density) and drilling parameters (wellbore position, drill
deviation, drill bit performance, borehole size and shape) as
described in [3]. The key enabling technology for MWD is the
real-time telemetry of data from the bottom of the hole to the
surface. Instruments in a module in the steering tool of the drill
string transmit real-time data to the MWD operator through
sound or electromagnetic wave, wired cable or mud column
(mud pulse), realizing telemetry [4]. Essentially, MWD operator
measures the trajectory of the hole as it is drilled (for example,
data updates arrive and are processed every few seconds or
faster). This information is then used to drill in a pre-planned
Fig. 1: Measurement-while-drilling telemetry system
II. T ELEMETRY TECHNIQUES
The real-time transmission of data from downhole to the
surface allows the MWD operator to make decisions on the
drilling process. Up to now, there are four known telemetry
techniques: electromagnetic, mud pulse, acoustic, and wired
cable, used in downhole logging and directional instruments
to transmit information to the surface plane [4].
Acoustic telemetry uses the steel walls of a drillstring as-
sembly as the main communication channel to transmit sound
waves to the surface [5], [6]. While data rates can be very
high, repeaters are generally required since there is significant
attenuation when the sound waves travel up. Acoustic telemetry
is preferred to conventional mud pulse telemetry because of
its faster data transmission rate. However, acoustic telemetry
requires a repeater for signal amplification because of the large

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signal attenuation that depends on the depth of drilling, which
makes the system complicated and expensive.
Electromagnetic telemetry employs electromagnetic waves
communication [7], [8], [9]. The main limitation of electro-
magnetic telemetry is the severe signal attenuation due to skin
depth effects. Repeaters must be utilized to improve the data
rates and extend the depth range.
Wired telemetry employs a special drill pipe with an embed-
ded cable that conveys the telemetry signal along pipe [10],
[11]. The drill pipes are modified by having a channel etched
on the side of the pipe wall to embed the cable under tension.
The method is too expensive and, moreover, connected cables
can easily be disconnected during the drilling.
Mud-pulse telemetry is the most common method of data
transmission in MWD systems [12]. Downhole, a mechanical
valve is mounted to modulate the flow of the mud (drilling
fluid) in accordance with the transmitted data. This results in
pressure changes representing the information. These pressure
variations propagate throw the drilling fluid to the surface plane
where they are received by pressure sensors. On the surface
plane, the sensor signal is sampled and passed to computers
for information decoding. Mud pulse telemetry is an electrome-
chanical system that creates pressure waves within the drilling
fluid through either positive, negative or continuous pulses.
The positive pressure pulse is the most used as the carriers of
downhole measurement data [4] and in this paper, we employ
this technique. On the ground, the pressure pulses are detected
through pressure sensors, and then the downhole measurement
data can be recovered after filtering and demodulating the mea-
sured signals. Compared to the high complexity, difficulty and
price of continuous-wave system implementation [13], the fluid
pressure pulse communication systems transmit short-duration
bursts of pressure energy [14]. It is verified [15] that the pres-
sure pulse transceivers have simpler architecture and require
more simplified control logic for equal speed communications
than those using carrier modulations. The technology can be
implemented in three varieties [12]: positive pulse, negative
pulse, or phase modulation. For example, positive pulse systems
create a momentary flow restriction (higher pressure than the
drilling-mud volume) in the drillpipe. In this paper, we deal
with the positive pulse tools, which partially close and open the
valve to restrict the mud flow in the drill pipe. This produces
an increase in pressure that can be seen at the surface.
III. P ULSE MODULATION
The digital information can be encoded in the pressure
signal using pulse position modulation (PPM) and pulse width
modulation (PWM). One information packet usually consists of
information and control parts [3]. The information part consists
of bits, represented by several pulses, and the control part is
given by 1 synchronization pulse and 1 pulse, representing
the packet index. Usually, error-correcting coding is not useful
for such short lengths because of weak correcting abilities.
In practice, errors occur by a small group [16], caused by
missed or false detected pulse, and short length code can’t
decode it. On other hand, codes with large block lengths are
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not applicable since long information part results in too much
delay in the receiver, but the data should be decoded online, i.e.
delay in decoding is very critical. Turbo code [17] can decode
information online, but it is too sensitive to the group of false
bits in case of low redundancy. Therefore, only parity code
could be utilized, but in fact, the information is transmitted
uncoded [14]. Pulser transmits information packets cyclically
one by one, therefore, early or late each packet will be decoded
at the surface.
State-of-the-art mud-pulse telemetry technologies [1], [12],
[3], [4] achieve data rates of up to 50 bit/s. However, noise
influence degrades the data rate. The most notable source of
noise is the fluctuations of the drill bit, caused by drilling
in heterogeneous soil or on-surface human influence [16].
This noise is non-Gaussian and given by interference pulses
with various widths. The mud pump creates a relatively high-
frequency noise, which can be easily filtered out on the surface
[15]. Signal power decreases with growing depth, while the
mud channel gets a multipath propagation nature, resulting in
a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Finally, the data rate drops
with the increasing length of the wellbore and is typically as
low as 0.5...3.0 bit/s at a depth of 104 meters since successful
data decoding is highly dependent on the SNR [3]. Low SNR
values mean high bit error probability, therefore, to keep low
packet error rate we need to utilize low length data packets.
However, with low length packets, the information redundancy
is rather high because of the high percentage of control data.
PPM is an accepted technique for transmitting information in
MWD. At the transmitter, the encoder maps blocks of Md bits
into a single PPM channel symbol by placing a single pulse into
one of L = 2Md time slots (delay index). After establishing
slot and symbol synchronization, the receiver detects PPM
symbols by determining which of the L slots contains the
pulse and performs the inverse mapping operation to recover
the bitstream. One of the key difficulties of implementing this
technique is that the receiver must be properly synchronized to
align the local clock with the beginning of each symbol [12].
That is why the synchronization symbol in PPM modulation
represents a rather long sequence of pulses, sending before a
group of packets.
The Differential PPM (D-PPM) is a variation of the PPM
coding, which transmits data regardless of a clock. The delay
between the pulses does not take reference from the rising edge
of the clock. Instead, each delay takes reference from the rising
edge of the previous pulse as shown in Fig. 2. As a result, an
averaged pulse transmission period is reduced (roughly) from
L to (L + 1)/2 time slots, resulting in a higher data rate than
PPM. Nevertheless, short synchronization pulses are necessary
to divide packets. The typical minus of differential modulation
is a twin error because a single pulse error degrades two blocks
by Md bits.
Besides position modulation, the width can also be mod-
ulated to increase the data rate as shown in Fig. 3 for 1sec
width pulse. However, the number of Mw bits per pulse is
limited because of the following reasons:
 Fig. 2: Differential pulse position modulation
1) Too small pulses could be missed because they are too
close to the noise threshold;
2) Pulse width degrades detection threshold adjustment;
3) Too high pulses cause pressure saturation, resulting in hard
symbols separation.
In practice, Mw = 1 or Mw = 2 bits per pulse could be
transmitted when the mud channel is good enough.
Fig. 3: Pulse width modulation
It should be noted that packets in both PPM and D-PPM
are assigned with a packet index as shown in Fig. 4 since a
sequence of packet types (or packet lengths) strongly depends
on drilling conditions, e.g. well depth and soil density, and
unknown in advance. It means that we do not know it until the
packet received.
In practice, D-PPM properties can be successfully utilized
for probabilistic data recovery because there is redundancy in
packet length. One can find the packet length when the pulse
related to the packet index is received. On the other hand, the
packet length can be calculated as a sum of pulses between
neighbor synchronization pulses. In this paper, we show how
to employ this redundancy for better receiver performance.
IV. S OFT PULSE DETECTION
The pulse detection algorithm is based on informative param-
eters analysis: rising edge (its linear range) length and slope
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Fig. 4: Telemetry packet structure
(its maximum value) as shown in Fig. 5. The slope starts
when the mechanical valve shuts the mud stream and stops
when the valve returns back. The liner range is calculated as
t1 + t2 and utilized for PWM. In the depth of 104 meters
valve moves very slow resulting in a low data rate. In practice,
pulses with the width less than 1sec are not utilized in such
huge depth, otherwise, the valve does not reach a closed state,
resulting in very low pulse amplitudes. Therefore, we use 1sec
pulse as our goal is to enhance telemetry performance in deep
wellbore. When both rising edge length and maximum slope
values exceed adaptive thresholds, the pulse is detected and
saved, otherwise, the pulse is recognized as noise and missed.
The algorithm calculates the adaptive threshold, using N1 last
pulses, detected with a fixed threshold. Then we choose N2
most similar pulses from the set of N1 and calculate the
adaptive threshold for rising edge length and for maximum
slope value as a weighted sum of these statistics over the N2
selected pulses. In practice, we have two adaptive thresholds
with the constant ratio instead of one as shown in Fig. 6, where
th1 /th0 = const. The th1 is the main one detection threshold
for baseline pulses detection, while the th0 is the secondary
threshold, responsible for those pulses detection, which did not
reach the main one because of drilling fluctuation influence.
Those pulses, which exceed th0 , but less than th1 , are named
secondary and saved for further hypotheses analysis. All pulses,
less than th0 , are assumed to be noise and missed. Finally,
the false detection probability is calculated for both main and
secondary pulses.
V. P ROBABILISTIC DECODING
In this paper, we propose a new soft (probabilistic) decoding
method to reduce the packet error rate. For each newly detected
pulse in the digital receiver, we calculate a special metric,
which means false detection probability. This metric means the
number of similarities between an expected pulse shape and
the current one. Knowing a set of possible packet lengths and
having a set of last N detected pulses with the assigned metrics
in the buffer, one can find the most expected packet content,
considering most expected hypotheses on pulses drift, loss or
false detection. For example, hypotheses on the assumption

Fig. 5: Pulse detection parameters
Fig. 6: Soft pulse detection
of a small drift of pulse delay are more expected than those
with a high drift, and assumption of single pulse loss (packet
incomplete) or single false detection (packet overfill) is more
expected than double loss or double false detection in the packet
decoding and so on. It should be noted that for each hypothesis
the packet is re-calculated to find the differential delay, resulting
in new delay indexes. Any hypothesis, containing a pulse with
a delay index higher than L value gets failed.
Preliminary rejection of unlikely hypotheses simplifies the
decoding process and avoids overcorrection, therefore, the
maximum number of assumptions is limited by distance d,
otherwise, the packet is not decoded. For example, if the current
hypothesis requires to increase the number of pulses in the
packet, we need to join our packet with one secondary pulse,
having the least false detection probability, and to re-calculate
delay indexes in the new packet. On the other hand, if the
current hypothesis requires to reduce the number of pulses in
the packet, we need to take one main pulse with the highest
false detection probability and exclude it from the packet, with
further packet re-calculation. Finally, with each newly detected
pulse we check a set of hypotheses (in practice, up to 16)
and provide the decoded packet if the following conditions are
satisfied:
1) decoded packet length is equal to the detected packet
index;
2) hypothesis has the minimum sum of assumptions (or
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errors) and this number is limited by d;
3) hypothesis has no pulse with delay indexes higher than
L;
4) assumption has the minimum false detection probability.
As a result, only the most expected packet data hypothesis
is taken. Then the corrections related to the final hypothesis
assumptions are applied to get the decoded packet. The decoded
packet is given with reliability (from 0% for the false decoded
packet to 100% for the case, where packet length = the number
of all pulses in the buffer), which is helpful for MWD operator
to make the decision.
Naturally, this method is similar to the Viterbi decoding
algorithm [18], but in the MWD we deal with detected pulses
instead of input bits, hypotheses instead of trellises, and the
redundancy is given by the priory knowledge of possible
package lengths instead of parity check bits.
VI. F IELD TEST RESULTS
In this section, we present field test results for the telemetry
system in 8750 meters depth borehole with the modulation
pulse width of 1sec. The pulse delay modulation step =
0.167sec and the PWM step = 0.167sec are the minimal edge
delay resolution, Mw = 1 (maximum value in practice for
high depth), otherwise threshold adaptation quality degrades.
Synchronization pulse delay should be minimized to reduce
redundancy in the packet and it is given by the delay of
1sec. Further delay reduction between control signals to the
mechanical valve doesn’t reduce the pulse delay since the valve
speed is too low in the 8750 meters depth. An averaged data
rate can be calculated as Ndata (Md +Mw ), divided by the mean
packet length, while the mean packet length also includes synch
and packet index pulses, where Ndata is an averaged number
of data pulses in the packet, which is scenario-specific. In our
case, the number Ndata = 5, and the table with possible data
rates is shown in Table 1. One can find that the pair Md = 3,
Mw = 1 is the optimal one to achieve a maximum data rate of
1.8bps for such conditions, therefore, each pulse carries 4 bits
(hex value) of information.
Parameters Md = 3, Mw = 1 were implemented in the
micro-controller unit of a practical telemetry system. The
proposed probabilistic decoding algorithm was implemented in
the MWD operator software as an extra option to the existing
(baseline) software. In Table 2 we demonstrate an example of
decoded messages in hex format for the baseline algorithm and
the new soft decoding algorithm, which differs from the first
one only in using package length redundancy. The baseline
solution employs the packet index for information de-mapping
only. We don’t provide a bit error rate (BER) dependency on
SNR because an additive noise is not so harmful, and most
errors are caused by the drilling in heterogeneous soil. We
were capturing the telemetry signal in 8 independent wells
with heterogeneous soil during 12 hours of test drilling with
pre-defined transmitted information (pilots) which corresponds
to 0.5 Mbits of transmitted information. The performance was
calculated with both the baseline algorithm and the probabilistic
decoding as an extension. According to our statistics, the soft
decoding algorithm results in 32% less packet error rate (1
packet contains 20 information bits). Let us remind you that
the probabilistic decoding was implemented as an extra option
to the existing solution and doesn’t depend on the baseline
algorithm.
Table 1: Optimal number of delay modulation bits Md
Table 2: Baseline decoding vs Soft decoding results
VII. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research project and, therefore, the paper would never
have been possible without the support and guidance of Prof.
Grigoriy Kabatiansky, advisor to Skoltech President for Sci-
ence.
VIII. C ONCLUSION
The proposed soft decoding algorithm demonstrates packet
error rate reduction by 32% in the real-life well on the 8750
meters depth borehole with the pulse width of 1sec and the
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data rate of 1.8bps. This approach is based on prior knowledge
of the set of possible package lengths and can be embedded in
any existing software of MWD operators as an extra option to
enhance the decoding performance of telemetry. The decoding
idea comes from soft Viterbi decoding [18], but in our case in-
formation is not encoded, and instead, we utilize packet length
redundancy. Considering soft detected pulses, we generate the
most expected hypotheses on message content, like Viterbi
trellises [18], and choose one with the highest probability.
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