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Exploiting Underground Mine Topology for Resilient Concurrent LoRa Mesh Emergency Communications: Architecture,
Hilary Kelechi Anabi1, Samuel Frimpong1, Muhammad Azeem Raza1
1Department of Mining and Nuclear Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO 65409, USA.
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
|June 26, 2026
Summary
A new Topology-Aware Concurrent LoRa (TACL) mesh protocol improves underground mine emergency communications. TACL uses mine structure to boost reliability and reduce latency, outperforming existing methods.
Area of Science:
- Electrical Engineering
- Computer Science
- Network Engineering
Background:
- Underground mine emergencies critically depend on reliable communication for rescue operations.
- Existing LoRa mesh protocols are ineffective in mines due to tunnel topology, signal discontinuities, and dead-end geometries.
Purpose of the Study:
- To present the Topology-Aware Concurrent LoRa (TACL) mesh protocol designed for underground mine environments.
- To enable autonomous role inference and concurrent transmission without GPS or pre-loaded maps.
Main Methods:
- Nodes autonomously infer structural roles using local RF observations and packet headers.
- TACL assigns different Spreading Factors (SFs) to source (SF12) and relay (SF7-SF10) nodes.
- Utilizes inter-SF orthogonality for concurrent decoding at junctions to prevent collision collapse.
Main Results:
- TACL achieved an 80.5% Packet Delivery Rate (PDR) in simulations, significantly outperforming baselines.
- Hardware deployment showed a 4.0x PDR improvement over topology-agnostic concurrent transmission.
- Demonstrated median latency of 1815 ms with 84x tighter spread and 2.5x lower energy per packet.
Conclusions:
- Exploiting underground mine topology is essential for reliable, predictable, and energy-efficient emergency mesh communications.
- TACL effectively prevents junction collision collapse through topology-aware SF diversity.
- The TACL protocol offers a robust solution for post-disaster underground mine communication scenarios.
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