An Online Calibration Method Based on n-Tuple and Opportunistic Communication for Mine Mass Portable Gas Sensors

Due to the increasing deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the mining industry, portable gas monitoring devices have been widely used. Sensor calibration of large-scale portable gas monitoring devices is becoming an urgent problem to be solved. An online sensor calibration algorithm based on n-tuple and opportunistic communication is proposed based on the specific characteristics (i.e., ‘single-sensor, multi-position’ and ‘multi-sensor, single-position’) of each portable gas monitoring device employed. In this paper, data collected from portable and fixed sensors were defined as multi-dimensional data points and gas monitoring data pairs, respectively. The cluster-based self-adaptive weighted data fusion algorithm and multi-period single sensor reliability fusion algorithm were proposed and used for overall judging. The overall judgments were broadcast to each wireless access point by network, and the reliability of the calibration information transmission was enhanced by opportunistic communications. The simulation results revealed that efforts required for the calibration of portable sensors were reduced significantly, and their reliability was improved.