Abstract
Underground mine emergencies compromise fixed communication infrastructure exactly when situational awareness is most critical for effective rescue operations. Existing LoRa mesh protocols fail in underground mines because they ignore the structured topology of tunnel networks, specifically the waveguide effect along straight galleries, severe signal discontinuity at junctions, and the dead-end geometry of working faces. This paper presents the Topology-Aware Concurrent LoRa (TACL) mesh protocol, in which each node autonomously infers its structural role from local RF observations and packet header information, without GPS, pre-loaded mine maps, or central coordination. Role classification resolves the contender estimation problem (Formula presented.) left open in the prior concurrent transmission literature, enabling provably bounded timing offsets before transmission. TACL assigns a spreading factor (SF)12 to dead-end source nodes for maximum link robustness and SF7–SF10 to relay nodes to create the inter-SF orthogonality margin required for concurrent decoding at junction nodes. Monte Carlo simulation of over 2000 trials yields TACL a PDR of 80.5% versus near-zero for all three baselines, confirming that topology-aware SF diversity is the necessary and sufficient mechanism to prevent junction collision collapse. Hardware deployment at the Missouri S&T Experimental Mine yields a 4.0x PDR improvement over the topology-agnostic concurrent transmission (CT)-fixed baseline, a median end-to-end latency of 1815 ms with 84x tighter latency spread than ALOHA-based protocols and 2.5x lower energy per delivered packet. These results establish that explicit exploitation of underground mine topology is essential for reliable, predictable, and energy-efficient emergency mesh communications in post-disaster underground mine scenarios.
Recommended Citation
H. K. Anabi et al., "Exploiting Underground Mine Topology for Resilient Concurrent LoRa Mesh Emergency Communications: Architecture, Protocol Design, and Performance Analysis," Sensors, vol. 26, no. 12, article no. 3701, MDPI, Jun 2026.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.3390/s26123701
Department(s)
Mining Engineering
Publication Status
Open Access
Keywords and Phrases
capture effect; contender estimation; energy efficiency; LoRa concurrent transmission; packet delivery ratio; self-organizing networks; spreading factor diversity; topology-aware mesh networking; underground mine emergency communications
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
1424-8220
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Final Version
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2026 The Authors, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Publication Date
01 Jun 2026
Comments
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Grant None