Abstract

Due to the remote location, access to mining industry in Canadian arctic region is only fly-in fly-out. With long and extreme cold winters and short cool summers, this mining industry can only ship ore for a short time during the open water season. These mines needed a solution to enable real-time remote monitoring, management, and control of a key part of their operations. Traditionally, Land Mobile Radio (LMR) technologies have been widely used in the deployment of Public Safety Networks (PSN) and mining industry so far.

LMR networks support sophisticated voice applications that can, to some extent, deal with the mission-critical nature of mining industry. However, LMR networks lack technological advancements to support broadband applications. Due to this limitation, the attention is drawn to the private Long-Term Evolution (LTE) technology for mining industry as it has the potential to support various narrowband and broadband applications and services. Private LTE networks have strict requirements in terms of scalability, latency, robustness, and resiliency.

In this presentation, first, we will highlight the main standard features of private LTE networks technologies and its possible deployment scenarios and mission critical applications in different industries. Then, we will present the Redline architectural design to provide an LTE broadband service and the backhauling requirement over a 125 km of road which represent a conveyer belt for mines in Canadian arctic region, which ran between the mobile ship loader systems and the feeder subsystems. The broadband LTE service is used to deploy on board surveillance camera on every vehicle traveling on the tote road and other isolated road to ensure driver and passenger safety as well as vital metrics on the vehicle themselves. In case of emergency, the camera should also be used as the first responder’s “eyes” on site to plan and provide first aid care and risk assessment. Moreover, we will present the deployment and implementation challenges for this type of private LTE networks. Finally, we will present the testing and application results (latency, DL throughput, UL throughput, … etc.) of this successfully implemented project.