Design and Simulation of WSN based scenario for underground coal mines

Abstract

This thesis is a summary of all the work that has been done by me during my B-Tech final year project work. The main purpose was to provide an implementable design scenario for underground coal mines using wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The main reason being that given the intricacies in the physical structure of a coal mine, only low power WSN nodes can produce accurate surveillance and accident detection data. The work mainly concentrated on designing and simulating various alternate scenarios for a typical mine and comparing them based on the obtained results to arrive at a final design. The simulations were done in Qulanet-4.5 simulator. The bytes send, received, throughput, MAC layer and physical layers were analyzed in the process for all the scenarios. The final results show a complicated arrangement of Personal Area Networks and a multiple hopping based PAN coordinator communication to ensure optimum utilization of the power scarce nodes.