IoT Based Enhanced Safety Monitoring System for Underground Coal Mines Using LoRa Technology

Extracting coal from Underground mine is a hazardous and tough job that needs continuous monitoring of environmental conditions to protect workers’ health and safety. Though some research works have explored wireless monitoring devices for underground mining, such as ZigBee and Wi-Fi technologies, they come with inherent restraints for instance restricted coverage, susceptibility to interference, reliability issues, security concerns, and high-power consumption. An Enhanced Safety Monitoring System for coal extraction from Underground Mines, employing LoRa communication technology for the effectual transmission of collected data to overcome existing challenges is discussed in this paper. The proposed system consists of two subsystems, one for monitoring the status of miners and another for comprehensive monitoring. LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) is a multipoint protocol and this media access control (MAC) enables low-power devices to establish communication with Internet of Things (IoT) applications over extended wireless connections for long-range networks. LoRaWAN operates on lower radio frequencies, thereby providing a longer range of communication. This technology is known for its efficiency in optimizing LPWAN, offering extended range, extended battery life, robustness, and cost-effectiveness, making it highly suitable for industrial mining applications.