Visible Light Communications for Underground Mining: Principles, Modeling and Research Directions

Visible light communications (VLC) is an emerging technology that has been tested in different contexts. One of the most complex and challenging environments for VLC is underground mining (UM), where tunnels, air pollution, machine and people mobility, and irregular surfaces generate several impairments to the communications channel. In this work, we briefly review the foundations of VLC and characterize the channel impairments to adapt the general VLC model to the propagation behavior in UM environments. In further detail, we describe the use of angle diversity receivers (ADRs) as a specific device designed to decrease the bit error rate (BER) of the VLC link. Subsequently, we assess a full UM-VLC configuration by integrating ADRs on the receiver’s end, through the development of an illustrative application scenario. Last but not least, we also provide a number of current research challenges and opportunities in the UM-VLC field.