Mining Goes Digital – Mueller et al. (Eds)
© 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-0-367-33604-2
563
LTE, 4G & 5G – Broadband mobile communications
in mining applications
W. Santos
R&D Automation, Epiroc Rock Drills AB, Sweden
ABSTRACT: Wireless connectivity is a key element in the journey towards the digital mine
where more and more industrial devices are expected to be connected to this new productivity
web. For many years, private high speed wireless networks in industry have been possible
thanks to the largely worldwide deployed standard IEEE802.11, popularly known as Wi-Fi.
This paradigm is now about to change, and it’s changing rapidly. This paper aims to offer a
high level overview of this new technology called LTE, how Epiroc will interact with it and
why it is becoming so popular especially amongst big mining operators.
1 INTRODUCTION
The rapid development of industrial and communication technologies in recent years have
increasingly benefit mining activities and operations around the globe. Many companies
are rapidly deploying these new tools and applications such as telemetry, wireless sensors,
remote operation, etc., in order to gain the associated productivity and financial benefits.
This trend, often referred to as the 4th industrial revolution, is heavily dependent on
integrating automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies, which in turn
requires ubiquitous and reliable connectivity to effectively support these technologies. This
paper presents and discusses in brief what LTE, 4G and 5G are, the basic components
and architecture as well as why it is being considered a more suitable long-term wireless
technology for mining applications.
1.1 What is it?
LTE is short for Long Term Evolution and is part of a global initiative standardization group
called 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project). The work on LTE was initiated in 2004 with
the overall aim of providing a new radio-access technology focusing on packet-switched data
only
1
. Additionally this standard included targets on peak data rates, user/system throughput,
spectral efficiency as well as backwards compatibility with legacy technologies. LTE is commercially known as 4G, the fourth generation of mobile broadband technologies.
LTE is considered the first truly universal standard and the very first data-centric, packetswitched, IP-based, mobile broadband technology. It can operate in many different frequency
bands (mostly licensed spectrum) as well as features various mechanisms for load balancing,
congestion control and traffic prioritization.
Through LTE much higher peak bit rates can be achieved under much lower latency compared to previous 3G standards. From its first release in 2008 (3GPP Release 8) the expected
downlink peak bit rate was of 300Mbps thanks to a number of features and mechanisms
aimed to efficiently utilize the available radio spectrum.
1. Previous mobile standards were purely circuit-switched and voice-centric. This started to change in 3G.
© 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-0-367-33604-2
563
LTE, 4G & 5G – Broadband mobile communications
in mining applications
W. Santos
R&D Automation, Epiroc Rock Drills AB, Sweden
ABSTRACT: Wireless connectivity is a key element in the journey towards the digital mine
where more and more industrial devices are expected to be connected to this new productivity
web. For many years, private high speed wireless networks in industry have been possible
thanks to the largely worldwide deployed standard IEEE802.11, popularly known as Wi-Fi.
This paradigm is now about to change, and it’s changing rapidly. This paper aims to offer a
high level overview of this new technology called LTE, how Epiroc will interact with it and
why it is becoming so popular especially amongst big mining operators.
1 INTRODUCTION
The rapid development of industrial and communication technologies in recent years have
increasingly benefit mining activities and operations around the globe. Many companies
are rapidly deploying these new tools and applications such as telemetry, wireless sensors,
remote operation, etc., in order to gain the associated productivity and financial benefits.
This trend, often referred to as the 4th industrial revolution, is heavily dependent on
integrating automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies, which in turn
requires ubiquitous and reliable connectivity to effectively support these technologies. This
paper presents and discusses in brief what LTE, 4G and 5G are, the basic components
and architecture as well as why it is being considered a more suitable long-term wireless
technology for mining applications.
1.1 What is it?
LTE is short for Long Term Evolution and is part of a global initiative standardization group
called 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project). The work on LTE was initiated in 2004 with
the overall aim of providing a new radio-access technology focusing on packet-switched data
only
1
. Additionally this standard included targets on peak data rates, user/system throughput,
spectral efficiency as well as backwards compatibility with legacy technologies. LTE is commercially known as 4G, the fourth generation of mobile broadband technologies.
LTE is considered the first truly universal standard and the very first data-centric, packetswitched, IP-based, mobile broadband technology. It can operate in many different frequency
bands (mostly licensed spectrum) as well as features various mechanisms for load balancing,
congestion control and traffic prioritization.
Through LTE much higher peak bit rates can be achieved under much lower latency compared to previous 3G standards. From its first release in 2008 (3GPP Release 8) the expected
downlink peak bit rate was of 300Mbps thanks to a number of features and mechanisms
aimed to efficiently utilize the available radio spectrum.
1. Previous mobile standards were purely circuit-switched and voice-centric. This started to change in 3G.