Evaluation of Shadowing Caused by Mining Machinery in V2I Communications

This paper analyzes the effects of shadowing in vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) links caused by haul trucks in surface mines. The work focuses on mobile cell sites, known as cell on wheels (COWs), which are widely used by the mining industry. The study relies on extensive ray tracing simulations based on realistic 3D CAD models and detailed propagation effects. The results are presented in terms of excess path loss for multiple frequency bands, namely 795 MHz, 2.6 GHz, 5.9 GHz and 28 GHz. As expected, blockage is very severe for mmW transmissions, but our results show that even sub-1 GHz links may suffer shadowing losses exceeding 20 dB under unfavorable conditions, e.g. haul trucks lifting the dump bed. The results can also guide future measurement campaigns and provide useful insights for engineers planning and optimizing mission-critical wireless networks in mines.