Novel Energy-Efficient Miner Monitoring System with Duty-Cycled Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Target monitoring is an important application of wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we develop an energy-efficient miner monitoring system with sensor nodes. To keep monitoring miners' activities in tunnels, periodical localization and timely data transmission are both required. Since the localization and data transmission much depend on the media access control (MAC) scheme, codesign of localization and MAC scheme is actually needed for the resource-constrained system, which is seldom discussed in existing related works. Moreover, as sensor nodes form an ultra-sparse network with linear topology in tunnels, it is a challenge for existing range-free localization methods to localize targets. In this paper, we propose a localization-MAC codesign approach for the monitoring system under the environment of coal mine. With the proposed approach, the system can achieve higher localization accuracy with low energy consumption and transmission delay, compared with existing range-free localization methods for sensor nodes.