A Critical Review on Slope Monitoring Systems with a Vision of Unifying WSN and IoT

Slope stability is one of the major geological concerns in open-cast mines. The mining area slopes needs to be regularly monitored to detect occurrence of any slope failure prior to any catastrophe. An early warning system solves this purpose preventing loss of significant mass of human lives as well as property. This is a critical scrutiny which renders various techniques and methodologies regarding slope monitoring of open-cast mine. Wireless sensor network (WSN) has been standing out as a productive competent tool for monitoring the tangible environmental structures by sensing the differences, processing this raw data and finally communicating the result to the web from where it can be referred for researches and predicting mechanisms. Internet of Things (IoT) comes into picture for communicating the sensed and processed data from the sensors to the application where it can be further analysed. In recent scenario, power issue is of great concern associated with deploying a real-time monitoring system. This review depicts how WSN can be adopted and preferred to any other technologies used in slope monitoring due to its advantages it brings. Moreover, collaborative operation of WSN with IoT results in a more systematic, robust, energy-efficient, cost-effective real-time monitoring approach.