Affiliation:
1. Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041, South Africa
2. Next Generation Enterprises and Institutions, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Pretoria 0001, South Africa
Abstract
Stopes suffer from unreliable wireless communication due to their harsh environment. There is a lack of confidence within industry regarding the effectiveness of existing solutions in providing reliable high-bandwidth performance in hard rock stopes. This work proposes that Wi-Fi6 is a good candidate for reliable high-bandwidth communications in underground hard rock stopes. Experiments in a tunnel and mine stope were conducted to evaluate the performance of Wi-Fi6 in terms of latency, jitter, and throughput. Different criteria, such as multi-hop systems, varying multipath, mesh routing protocols, and frequencies at different bandwidths, were used to evaluate performance. The results show that Wi-Fi6 performance is greater in stopes compared to tunnels. Signal quality evaluations were conducted using the Asus RT-AX53U running OpenWrt, and an additional experiment was conducted on the nrf7002dk running Zephyr OS to evaluate the power consumption of Wi-Fi6 against the industry standard for low-powered wireless communications, IEEE 802.15.4. Wi-Fi6 was found to be more power-efficient than IEEE 802.15.4 for Mbps communications. These experiments highlight the signal robustness of Wi-Fi6 in stope environments and also highlights its low-powered nature. This work also highlights the performance of the two most widely used open-source mesh routing protocols for Wi-Fi.
Funder
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
Mandela Mining Precinct and South African Mining Extraction Research, Development & Innovation (SAMERDI) strategy
Department of Science and Innovation under the Foundational Digital Capabilities Research Programme in its Distributed Networks and Processes Programme