The critical environment of the underground mines is a risky zone for mining applications and it is very hazardous to engage the miners without a sophisticated communication system. The existing wired networks are susceptible to damage and the wireless radio systems experience severe fading that restricts the complete access to the entire assembly of a mine. Wireless optical communication is a better approach that can be incorporated in the erratic atmosphere of underground mines to overcome such issues, as lights are already used to illuminate the mine galleries. This study is focused on investigating the characteristics of visible light communication (VLC) in an underground coal mine. The entire scope of VLC is elaborated along with the influence of coal dust particles and the scattering model. The impact of coal dust clouds on visibility and attenuation is analyzed for visible light transmission. The shadowing effect generated by the pillars and mining machinery is estimated by employing the bimodal Gaussian distribution (BGD) approach in coal mines. The characteristic model of VLC for underground coal mines is presented by classifying the area of the mine into mine gallery and sub-galleries. The transmission links of VLC are categorized as the line of sight (LOS) link for direct propagation and the non-LOS (NLOS) link for reflected propagation. The scenarios of LOS and NLOS propagation are considered for each evaluating parameter. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed framework is examined by computing the received signal power, path loss, delay spread (DS), and signal to noise ratio (SNR).

The environment of underground coal mines has challenging properties that makes this zone inadaptable for a stable communication system. Additionally, various deteriorating physical parameters strongly affect the performance of wireless networks, which leads to limited network coverage and poor quality of data communication. This study investigates the communication capability in underground coal mines by optimizing the wireless link to develop a stable network for an underground hazardous environment. A hybrid channel-modeling scheme is proposed to characterize the environment of underground mines for wireless communication by classifying the area of a mine into the main gallery and sub-galleries. The complex segments of mine are evaluated by categorizing the wireless links for the line-of-sight (LOS) zones and hybrid modeling is employed to examine the characteristics of electromagnetic signal propagation. For hybrid channel modeling, the multimode waveguide model and geometrical optic (GO) model are used for developing an optimal framework that improves the accessibility of the network in the critical time-varying environment of mines. Moreover, the influence of various deteriorating factors is analyzed using 2.4 GHz to 5 GHz frequency band to study its relationship with the vital constraints of an underground mine. The critical factors such as path loss, roughness loss, delay spread, and shadow fading are examined under detailed analysis with variation in link structure for the mine.