While a robust and reliable communication network for monitoring the mining environment in a timely manner to take care of people, the planet Earth and profits is key, the mining environment is very challenging in terms of achieving reliable wireless transmission. This survey therefore investigates the reliability of LoRaWAN communication in the mining environment, identifying the challenges and design requirements. Bearing in mind that LoRaWAN is an IoT communication technology that has not yet been fully deployed in mining, the survey incorporates an investigation of LoRaWAN and other mining IoT communication technologies to determine their records of reliability, strengths and weaknesses and applications in mining. This aspect of the survey gives insight into the requirements of future mining IoT communication technologies and where LoRaWAN can be deployed in both underground and surface mining. Specific questions that the survey addresses are: (1) What is the record of reliability of LoRaWAN in mining environments? (2) What contributions have been made with regard to LoRa/LoRaWAN communication in general towards improving reliability? (3) What are the challenges and design requirements of LoRaWAN reliability in mining environments? (4) What research opportunities exist for achieving LoRaWAN communication in mining environments? In addition to recommending open research opportunities, the lessons learnt from the survey are also outlined.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems are increasingly deployed in heavy industrial facilities to support real-time monitoring, automation, and safety-critical operations. Long-range low-power communication technologies such as LoRaWAN are widely used for large-scale sensor connectivity due to their long communication range and energy efficiency. However, dense industrial deployments may experience reduced communication reliability due to network congestion, packet collisions, and challenging propagation conditions caused by metallic infrastructure and electromagnetic interference. To address these limitations, this paper proposes RSrSF-LoRa, an integrated implementation of the reserved spreading factor (rSF) mechanism within the RS-LoRa framework (lightweight scheduling), designed to improve reliability for critical traffic. The study presents a comparative performance evaluation of RSrSF-LoRa and LoRaWAN in a smelter IIoT deployment, assessing packet delivery ratio (PDR), throughput, fairness, energy consumption and scalability under varying node densities and gateway configurations. Single-gateway scenarios with 100, 500, and 1000 nodes, and seven-gateway scenarios with 1000 and 2100 nodes, are evaluated as communication distances increase. The results indicate that while throughput and fairness remain comparable across approaches, RSrSF-LoRa improves alarm message reliability in dense single-gateway deployments, extending the acceptable PDR from 700 m to 900 m. Alarm nodes in RSrSF-LoRa consume slightly more energy due to reserved transmission, but overall energy consumption remains comparable. These findings provide design insights for reliable and energy-aware industrial IoT networks in smelter environments.