Communication of Sensor Data in Underground Mining Environments: An Evaluation of Wireless Signal Quality over Distance
, Oluwafemi Kolade 2,3, Muhammad Ahsan Mahboob 2, Frederick Thomas Cawood 4 and Youhei Kawamura 5,6Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
As the underground mines face more and more difficult geological and mining conditions, health and safety issues are more important than ever. Monitoring systems are present in mining industry for years and they are able to control almost each aspect of the risk factors, such as natural hazards (like methane concentration, fire prevention etc.) or geomechanical state (e.g. stress, strain or fracturing). Characteristics of underground mines forces monitoring systems to be wired, despite rapid development of wireless communication. However, wireless monitoring systems are future of the underground mines control and that is why each work on it is a big contribution to safety of underground mining.
However, this paper requires some improvements:
- There is a room for improvement of English.
- Abstract might be a little longer.
- In lines 155-156 You state that “In order to develop a differential in-situ stress or strain monitoring system, it is necessary to develop a measurement unit (sensing) in addition to the communication unit.”. In fact there are some stress and strain measuring systems for tunnelling or civil engineering that may be considered to use in underground mine, so there is no requirement for development of another measuring unit. However, it is not an issue of merit but more the style of the language.
- Layout of the article makes it hard to read sometimes. It would be better to place figures and tables after the sections and not in the middle of them.
- Figures might be a little big bigger (especially figure 4 and eventually figures 5-7).
Would You consider referring to an article on underground infrastructure monitoring (https://www.intechopen.com/online-first/75296)?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This is a good foundation piece for ongoing research into methods and technologies to improve safety in underground mines. The results are not unexpected, yet provide a good ground truth for further studies. I look forward to further studies on communication validation building on this work.
Minor English changes recommended:
line: existing text = recommended text
11: advancements = advances
40: at a far distance =a long distance away
77: The security challenges = Security challenges
88: ZigBee have been = ZigBee has been
126: Asides = Aside from
148: in the long walls of underground = in longwall underground
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors present a study about the WSN performance over distance in underground mining environments.
The paper has many concerns that should be considered before publication as follows:
A descriptive paragraph is desired to add at the end of the introduction to illustrate the paper's structure.
The paper's contribution is not clear.
In such a vulnerable system, the security front is barely discussed. How can the authors distinguish between the real attack effect and the hardware failure? How to make sure of the data trustworthiness, etc? How to effectively manage power consumption? What about the different environments such as indoor, outdoor, etc?
The authors have to do more surveys about the related works. The following papers are recommended, which extensively studied these issues:
- A game-theoretic approach for enhancing security and data trustworthiness in IoT applications
- Prolonging smart grid network lifetime through optimising number of sensor nodes and packet length
-An effective stackelberg game for high-assurance of data trustworthiness in wsns
-Non-zero-sum game-based trust model to enhance wireless sensor networks security for IoT applications
- Employing game theory and TDMA protocol to enhance security and manage power consumption in WSNs-based cognitive radio
The proposed approach suffers from a lack of mathematical analysis.
The quality of the upper panel of Fig. 4 is poor.
What is the type of simulator used in the proposed analysis?
It is recommended to add a table of the experimental parameters.
The legend and index font of the figures is too small. The font should be consistent with the figure size.
It is not clear the unit of the right-hand side legend in Fig. 8. Besides, did the authors use any logarithmic scale?
What about showing the packet loss ratio, the latency, the power consumption?
The authors should compare their obtained results with the corresponding approaches in the literature to show the enhanced performance using their proposal.
The conclusion should focus on the main findings (insights) of the paper.
It is recommended to the authors to add a table of abbreviations.
Most of the references are outdated. The authors have to consider the recent related works.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
This paper proposes a practical integration of multi-sensor, monitoring system within Wi-Fi system to determine the underground mining environment. LoS and NLoS are studied to support the data transmission. This paper is generally well written. I have the following comments to help the authors to improve the paper.
- An overview architecture should be added to give the readers of idea what this practical integration looks like in general. Both literal and figure are needed.
- The contribution summary and organization of the paper should be given.
- A related work section should be added to show all existing work related to wireless network enabled underground mining IoTs.
- Key related work in mining IoT are missing. Please consider to discuss the follows.
Zhang, L. Zhao, K. Yang and L. Xu, "Mobile Edge Computing for Intelligent Mining Safety: A Case Study of Ventilator," 2020 IEEE Intl Conf on Parallel & Distributed Processing with Applications, Big Data & Cloud Computing, Sustainable Computing & Communications, Social Computing & Networking (ISPA/BDCloud/SocialCom/SustainCom), 2020, pp. 1300-1305
Liangcai Fang, Chungui Ge, Guolin Zu, Xinkun Wang, Weiguo Ding, Changliang Xiao, Liang Zhao, “A Mobile Edge Computing Architecture for Safety in Mining Industry,” The 19th IEEE International Conference on Scalable Computing & Communications, 2019, UK.
- I suggest to merge Section 4 and 5 into one section.
- There are typos and grammar errors. For example, the title of Section 4, set-up => setup
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors have addressed the raised comments that improved the paper’s quality. I would recommend acceptance to the paper.
