Testing of Lora Module for Communications Systems in Opencast Mine- Vis-a-vis Slope Stability

Abstract

Recently scientific studies on integration of TDR directly with Arduino boards and XBee modules for real-time transmission of slope monitoring data were conducted as a part of Ministry of Mines, Government of India (GOI) sponsored project highlighting the impetus on urgent need of innovative Wireless techniques for mines. This paper presents a critical review of application of various communication systems for transfer of data from sensors deployed for monitoring strata behaviour to various appliances such as desktop /mobile of concerned officials. Slope stability is one of the major geological concerns in open-cast mines. The mining area slopes needs to be regularly monitored to detect occurrence of any slope failure prior to any catastrophe. An early warning system solves this purpose preventing loss of significant mass of human lives as well as property. This is a critical scrutiny which renders various techniques and methodologies regarding Slope monitoring of open-cast mine. Wireless sensor network has been standing out as a productive competent tool for monitoring the tangible environmental structures by sensing the differences, processing this raw data and finally communicating the result to the web from where it can be referred for researches and predicting mechanisms. Internet of Things comes into picture for communicating the sensed and processed data from the sensors to the application where it can be further analysed. In recent scenario power issue is of great concern associated with deploying a real-time monitoring system. This paper also presents the results of range test conducted at NIT-Rourkela on application of LoRa module. Test conducted from 1 m to 2.0 km range showed RSSI of -82 to -127 dBm.