Miners shadowing effects on 60 GHz transmission rate in underground mine Ricean channels

Practically, 60 GHz wireless communications require highly directional antennas to overcome the severe free space loss. In underground mines, the effects of the complete blockage of line-of-sight (LOS) by miners are unavoidable. This paper presents an experimental study for assessing NLOS miner shadowing effects (MSE) on data transmission. Thus, two separate measurement scenarios are performed with and without the presence of a miner in the channel i.e, LOS, and NLOS MSE. Result show that, LOS underground mines are Ricean channels with a K-factor of 9.3 dB. However, the presence of a miner restrains K-factor to 3.6 dB. Furthermore, the experimental channel bit error rate (BER) are validated theoretically. Thus, confirming that under MSE scenario, an additional SNR of more than 13 dB is required to yield a BER of 10 ^-4 as compared to LOS case.