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Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a target technology for oil and gas pipeline monitoring because they offer benefits of low cost, ease of deployment and ability to cater for data acquisition at great spatial and temporal scales. In order for WSN to achieve trademark performance in remote monitoring of pipelines, and surpass the performance of present-day traditional monitoring systems, certain design requirements must be met. In this paper, we identify vital design issues that must be considered to facilitate the employment of WSN for pipeline monitoring. We classify these design issues into five different categories namely; sensing modality, power efficiency, energy harvesting, network reliability and localization. In addition, we discuss the concept of cooperative communication for pipeline-monitoring sensor networks deployed in sub-sea environments. We also study the employment of sensor networks for …