An Empirical Study of Propagation Models for Wireless Communications in Open-pit Mines

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the suitability of thepropagation models ITU-R 526, Okumura Hata, COST Hatamodels and Standard Propagation Model (SPM) to predictthe path loss in open-pit mines. The models are evaluated bycomparing the predicted data with measurements obtained in twooperational iron-ore mining complexes in Brazil. Additionally, asimple deterministic model, based on the inclusion of an effectiveantenna height term to the ITU-R 526, is proposed and comparedto the other methods. The results show that the proposed modelresults in root-mean-square error values between 5.5 dB and 9.2dB, and it is capable of providing a close approximation of thebest predictions (i.e. those with lowest root-mean-squared error)as provided by the SPM. The proposed model, however, reducesthe calibration complexity considerabl