UWB Spatial Fading and Small Scale Characterization in Underground Mines

This paper reports on experimental results of UWB channel propagation in underground mines. Because the mine architecture and topology is often irregular and composed of interconnected corridors, two cases were treated, namely LOS and NLOS. The goal of this work is not to formulate a channel model for UWB systems or to provide a universal model for all environments in which UWB devices will be operating, but rather to provide a set of tools that can be used to fairly evaluate the performance of different UWB physical layer proposals in real channels such as underground mines. This work was carried out by the Underground Communications Research Laboratory, LRCS, in the MMSL-CANMET experimental mine (Mining and Mineral Sciences Laboratories-Canadian Center for Minerals and Energy Technology) in Val-d´Or, Canada