A new alarming system for an underground mining environment using visible light communications

Abstract

Visible light communication (VLC) system has been widely used in underground mines, to support communication-blind areas, due to its superior benefits compared to Wi-Fi. These benefits include low energy consumption, wide frequency spectrum (430–790) THZ, higher data rates and small-sized infrastructure. Moreover, radio waves have poor underground communication capabilities, due to irregular data propagation and limited frequency ranges. Therefore, cannot be used underground for affective communication required for health and safety measures in mines environment. In this paper, we introduce VLC based communication system for underground mines, for reducing the probability of accidents, and improving safety for mines work environment. We model the communication channel considering the shadowing and mines dust effects on optical signals. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed model in terms of BER and improved received power, specially for small distance between the transmitter and receiver.