Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The mining industry is a significant contributor to the Canadian economy, requiring close to 100,000 people to be hired by 2020. However, mining workers are exposed to five times higher occupational hazards than the industrial average. In addition, the mining sector also uses a significant amount of energy and a major source of pollution. Until the recent MINER act, there is little interest in providing communication services in mines. The MINER act made tracking all coal miners mandatory, which will require a reliable Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure. Such a system will significantly improve worker safety and enable effective locating and rescuing missions after disasters. Deployment of ICT will also play a key role in reducing the energy consumption making the mines smarter. However, there are significant challenges in developing reliable communication network for mines. Most importantly, the communication network must have very low power consumption to meet the stringent safety requirements of coal mines. Mines are full of irregular tunnels and blockades and mine topologies change dynamically. Therefore, regular over-the-ground technologies are not directly applicable. In this project, various technologies will be investigated and algorithms will be developed to achieve this goal. Prototypes will be developed and tested in actual mines through our ongoing collaboration with the industry. We have targeted a few specific areas of research: (1) the wireless sensor portion, which will consist of wearable and fixed tags with very low power consumption, cost, and complexity; (2) optimization of the RF distribution network with leaky feeder and distributed antennas, while minimizing power consumption while increasing the tracking accuracy; (3) handling the nonlinearity and dispersion issues of the radio-over-fiber technology which is the key to carry RF signals over long distances with low loss.