Confined spaces include coal mines, tunnels, urban underground facilities, and similar scenarios.Macro base stations struggle to penetrate signal to these subterranean environments. Meanwhile reliable communication equipment is essential in relaying information to attendants, entry supervisors, and other authorities regarding potentially dangerous changes in the confined space conditions. Such information is critical to assess the hazards within the space and to provide information regarding methods appropriate for protecting or removing employees from those hazards. All these present unique challenges for confined space scenarios:

• Solutions for such environments must address the constraints of strict low-power operation(to prevent safety incidents like gas explosions), compact form factor and Easy deployment
• Underground tunnels introduce significant multipath interference and signal blockage, demanding high-performance wireless signal processing algorithms.

Picocom’s small cell solutions effectively resolve these challenges. Our field-proven products have already been deployed or tested in operational environments including coal mines and utility tunnels

This solution adopts an independent private network design, deploying intrinsically safe 5G integrated base stations and all-in-one 5G picocell base stations with mining safety certification in underground mines. Utilizing lightweight 5GC (5G Core) and MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing), it establishes a private network with public network egress.

The system provides:

High-reliability physical isolation for mining applications

On-premises data processing(ensuring production data never leaves the mining area)

Enhanced data security

Reduced system latency

Remote monitoring capability via public networks

This field-proven solution has been commercially deployed in multiple mining operations.

During the underground confined space testing competition organized by one Power- Cable Company, a single small cell base station achieved communication coverage equivalent to a 9-node Mesh ad-hoc network, while delivering 10-20 times higher data transmission rates.

Urban underground space refers to the space below the surface of the ground in the urban planning area, including the space of various underground buildings. Reliable communication equipment is essential in the case of an emergency in underground space. This requires comprehensive signal coverage for underground garages, subway stations, underground sidewalks, underground shopping malls, civil air defense facilities and other places to ensure that users and equipment can receive a stable signal at any location, so that in an emergency, the communication system can work normally, provide positioning, alarm, distress and other functionalities to guarantee the safety.