Executive Summary : | A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network of self organized tiny sensor nodes that are deployed over a target region. The potential applications of WSN such as environmental monitoring, military surveillance, fire detection, disaster management, temperature, humidity, health monitoring and so on attracted the research community. Among these applications, environmental monitoring in coal mine has been chosen as one of the most prominent applications of WSN as the physical conditions (like, temperature, humidity, pressure etc.,) of the coal mine environment changes continuously. Moreover, due to complex nature of the coal mine, and to ensure the safety of the coal mine production, it is very necessary to monitor the information of environment. However, the existing coal mine cannot meet the requirements of coverage with wired network. Thus, hundreds of people die every year in the mines due to lack of safety measures. As a solution, the advanced or improved routing protocols of underground WSN meet the requirement in improving the monitoring quality, and the survival time of the network. The project would be carried out in following steps: 1. Identifying the best deployment strategies of sensor nodes in an underground coal mine monitoring system. 2. Developing an energy efficient routing protocol for the deployed sensor network. 3. Design and development of the effective fleet management system. 4. Validating the new deployment, routing algorithms and fleet management system. 5. Evaluating the performance of the complete system with an underground and opencast coal mine. |