Deployment Strategies for the Industrial IoT: A Case Study Based on Surface Mines

The mining industry is on a transition towards unmanned operations. This implies a step change in wireless infrastructure expansion to support autonomous and teleoperated machinery. This paper investigates how the topographic changes over the course of 10 years of continuous mining affect the propagation conditions, and impacts the performance associated with different deployment strategies for wireless networks in a large open-pit mining complex in Brazil. Through a series of system-level simulations, using detailed terrain models, realistic traffic volumes and a dedicated propagation model, we compare the ability of different deployment strategies, and network features, to meet given performance targets with existing technology. The results show that heterogeneous deployments can be exploited to continuously guarantee coverage in this ever- changing topography, while interference mitigation techniques, such as enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) and beamforming, can be used to reduce the system outage without need to increase the spectrum.