Abstract
Underground mine emergencies destroy communication infrastructure when situational awareness is most critical. Current systems rely on centralized network infrastructure, which fails during emergencies when miners are trapped and require rescue coordination. This paper proposes an energy-harvesting LoRa mesh network that addresses self-powered operation, interference management, and adaptive physical layer optimization under severe underground propagation conditions. A dual-antenna architecture separates RF energy harvesting (860 MHz) from LoRa communication (915 MHz), enabling continuous operation with supercapacitor storage. The core contribution is a decentralized scheduler that derives optimal timing offsets by modeling concurrent transmissions as a Poisson collision process, exploiting LoRa's capture effect while maintaining network coherence. A SINR-aware physical layer adapts spreading factor, bandwidth, and coding rate with hysteresis, controls recomputing timing parameters after each change. Experimental validation in Missouri S&T's operational mine demonstrates far-field wireless power transfer (WPT) reaching 35 m. Simulations across 2000 independent trials show a 2.2x throughput improvement over ALOHA (49% vs. 22% delivery ratio at 10 nodes/hop), 64% collision reduction, and 67% energy efficiency gains, demonstrating resilient emergency communications for underground environments.
Recommended Citation
H. K. Anabi et al., "Energy-Harvesting Concurrent LoRa Mesh with Timing Offsets for Underground Mine Emergency Communications," Information Switzerland, vol. 16, no. 11, article no. 984, MDPI, Nov 2025.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.3390/info16110984
Department(s)
Mining Engineering
Second Department
Computer Science
Publication Status
Open Access
Keywords and Phrases
dynamic LoRa concurrent transmission; IoT; LoRa; low power wide area network; RF energy harvesting; underground mines communication disaster networks
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
2078-2489
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Final Version
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2025 The Authors, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Publication Date
01 Nov 2025
Comments
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Grant None