The Design and Evaluation of a Wireless Sensor Network for Mine Safety Monitoring Xiaoguang Niu12(Member IEEE), Xi Huang12, Ze Zhao1, Yuhe Zhang12, Changcheng Huang1(Senior Member IEEE), Li Cui1＊(Member IEEE) 1 Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China 100080 2Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China 100049 {niuxiaoguang, huangxi, zhaoze, zhangyuhe, huangchangcheng, lcui }@ict.ac.cn ＊ Corresponding Author Abstract – This paper describes a wireless sensor network for mine safety monitoring. Based on the characteristics of underground mine gallery and the requirements for mine safety monitoring, we proposed a distributed heterogeneous hierarchical mine safety monitoring prototype system, namely HHMSM. This system is capable of monitoring methane concentration, and locating miner. We proposed a novel overhearing-based adaptive data collecting scheme which exploits the redundancy and correlation of the sampling readings in both time and space to reduce traffic and control overhead with a well-bounded offset error for large-scale sensor networks. This mechanism is easy to implement and low-cost compared to other more theoretically based mechanisms such as Kalman filter. Experimental results show that HHMSM achieves better performance on flexibility, correctness, coverage, and lifetime compared with other existing wireless mine safety monitoring systems. I. INTRODUCTION Underground mining is inherently dangerous and its safety monitoring is a complex, interdisciplinary research area which spans several decades. In China, almost half of the local mine fatalities are caused by methane explosions [1]. Therefore, the essential function of mine safety monitoring system is to monitor and locate the methane leakage timely. Furthermore it should meet the requirements of low-latency, high data fidelity, fully and reliable coverage on the underground mining tunnels. The current underground mine safety monitoring systems are of two kinds: wired systems and wireless ones. The wired safety monitoring systems have some inherent problems (e.g. lack of monitoring in the most hazard working area). Wireless sensor networks have the potential to effectively handle these problems [2]. In previous work, Lauri et al proposed a wireless solution which provides wireless and real-time connection with full coverage from underground mine to the enterprise information system [3]. However this system requires high bandwidth and a great amount of power consumption. The goal of this work is to develop a large scale, energy-saving, low cost, reusable, and effective wireless sensor network to meet the practical requirements for the mine safety monitoring. It is capable of monitoring the change of methane concentration, and locating miners. To achieve this challenging goal we started by studying the existing underground mine safety monitoring systems and identifying their requirements and constraints. We then set up a hierarchical prototype system for underground mine safety monitoring, namely HHMSM. The major contributions in this paper consist of the following aspects: z We developed a heterogeneous hierarchical mine safety monitoring network prototype which is divided into three tiers to achieve system flexibility and coverage. z We proposed a novel overhearing-based adaptive data collecting scheme which exploits the traits of the lower-tier sensor network--redundancy and correlation of the sampling readings in both time and space to select local sampling and transmission rules for the sensor nodes so that the performance of the system is optimized, including a better correctness and lifetime. z We implemented the prototype system and conducted experiments with it. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section II discusses the related works in sensor network applications and underground mine safety monitoring systems. In Section III, we describe the overall architecture and design contributions of HHMSM system, and provide a high-level description of its functionality. Section IV describes the proposed efficient data and transmission scheme which drives our system’s requirements and design. Then we present the experiment results and evaluate the performance of HHMSM in Section V. Finally, Section VI concludes the paper. II. RELATED WORKS Numerous sensor network applications have been proposed for the areas like habitat monitoring, structure monitoring [4, 5] and so on. As to the mine safety monitoring system, many current underground systems are deployed by means of wireless communication technology. Ndoh et al. proposed a wireless propagation model [2] to validate that the realization of the wideband wireless LAN in a complex and diffracting rough mine is possible. Some researchers have implemented networks and topologies based on wireless LAN for underground mine communications [3]. Srinivasan et al. proposed a hybrid wireless network topologies along with heterogeneous communication protocols to support high and low bandwidth applications [6]. However, the wired basestations are only deployed in the relatively fixed mine corridors, and the wireless devices in the profile of mine working need high transmission power to communicate with basestations. So the key disadvantage of these systems is the high power consumption and cost of the wireless devices. Recently, many researchers have investigated how to make the continuous monitoring in sensor networks more energy- efficient by exploiting the correlation in both time and space ofthe readings. Chu et al. proposed the Ken [7] framework which uses a joint probability model to reduce the communication overhead. The Ken exploits spatial correlations across nodes to improve compression of the data communicated to the basestation without imposing undue communication burdens to maintain the models. However temporal correlation cannot be fully exploited in the Ken. By monitoring a combination of individual values and relation- ships between neighboring values, CONCH [8] exploits spatio-temporal correlations in data much more effectively. However, most of these mechanisms cannot guarantee a bounded error exponent while aiming at minimizing the total communication consumption. One of our contributions is to fully exploit the potential of spatio-temporal correlation in minimizing the energy cost with a well-bounded error exponent. III. MINE SAFETY MONITORING USING SENSOR NETWORKS In
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