Mobile Edge Computing for Intelligent Mining Safety: A Case Study of Ventilator

The underground mining field sometimes is uncertain, which may lead to the severity of incidents, including explosion, corruption, and toxic air. To this end, it is vital to monitor and analyze the possibility of incidents and promote the corresponding rescue actions. It is still challenging to realize real-time data processing, in which the deployment of large computing devices is facing problems, including energy, space, and surrounding dusty environment. Besides, due to the complex environment, transmitting the collected data to the remote cloud can suffer from the inevitable high latency under the current communication technology, in which suffer. By bringing the server to the location closed to the miner, mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising distributed computation architecture to seize the opportunity of enabling low-cost, low-latency collection and processing. In the underground mining field, miners' life status should be monitored in real-time In this context, MEC is a right candidate for such a scenario. In this paper, we discuss the utilization of MEC for analyzing miner's body condition. We also show the challenges and open issues of such an application. Also, we give a case study of using MEC-enabled miner health platform to assist the ventilator in the underground field.