Abstract
Every year, mining industry sees huge losses in terms of human lives and valuable infrastructure due to accidents and disasters. Besides other measures, effective monitoring and control can greatly reduce the risks of such incidents. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are increasingly being used for such applications. This paper proposes a WSN-based system, which is capable of detecting and identifying events of interest (with 90% success rate) and localization of miners (2-4 m) and roof falls (10-12 m). A comprehensive integrated system covering a range of aspects from radio frequency propagation, communication protocol with latency, and energy-efficiency tradeoff and autonomous event detection is presented. The results show a lower path loss for 433 MHz operating frequency compared to 868 MHz. Moreover, a novel energy-efficient hybrid communication protocol using both periodic and aperiodic modes of communication while adhering to low latency requirement for emergency situations is proposed and implemented. Finally, for intelligent processing of gathered data, a spatio-temporal and attribute-correlated event detection mechanism suitable for the highly unreliable mine environment is described.