Contents I. Introduction
Frequent mine accidents are a major problem in the mineral industry today. The natural conditions of mines are highly complicated and capricious. Due to unawareness of abnormal dangers, thousands of miners die or hurt when accidents occur [1]. This will be avoided if a safety monitoring system can be developed to anticipate accidents through multi-parameter sensing at many locations in the mine and enable real-time disaster communication. Existing wired safety monitoring systems for mines are often installed only in the main tunnel and can't be extended to branches in real-time as mining progresses [2]. Also, once the wired network is destroyed or has faults, the whole system fails to provide information about personnel location; disabling rescue operations of miners at the time of disasters. Thus it is impossible to monitor these dangers in real-time using wired systems. A system which is flexible, easily deployable and adopts a reliable communication technology to ensure realtime monitoring and early warning of disaster is to be employed. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have a series of characteristics, such as fast expansibility, self-organization, multi-hop routing, dynamic topology, making it the best available choice for mine safety monitoring networks [3].
