A large-scale mining company based in a very remote location decided to improve its network coverage for the unmanned vehicles that were on-site. Peplink achieved this by installing state-of-the-art access points and routers all around the vicinity, making the network more reliable and providing stronger signals for IoT devices.
Challenge
The mining company was experiencing unstable connectivity and poor signal coverage due to the sheer size and geographical location of the mining plant, which posed a significant safety threat as numerous IoT devices experienced low cellular and Wi-Fi signal coverage. This was especially true for the unmanned trucks that were traveling across the plant.
The unreliable network resulted in inconsistent SD-WAN router performance, as routers were unable to select the smartest path to route the traffic. Even after fine-tuning the sensitivity of the Peplink routers, our engineers realized that there was still room for improvement as the WAN health check waiting periods were still significant. This caused delays for the routers in the vehicles to connect to the non-Peplink access points deployed across the site.
Solution
Peplink addressed these issues by first deploying MAX Transit Duo Pro routers within the autonomous vehicles on-site. The MAX routers provided the self-driving trucks with both Wi-Fi WAN and cellular connections, thereby stabilizing the connection for these vehicles. Additionally, the MAX routers support advanced roaming algorithms in the Wi-Fi WAN settings. This created an opportunity for the mining company to improve not only the roaming signal level threshold, gain, and interval but also support intensive scan signal level and interval. The addition of these advanced algorithms drastically reduced the duration of Wi-Fi WAN source health checks or roaming waiting times.
Also, by replacing the existing access points with Peplink Access Points, AP One AX, the compatibility of all the devices greatly increased. By incorporating these access points into the network, the mining company was able to utilize Peplink’s AP beacon functionality, making processes such as executing pings, DNS lookups, or other WAN health checks absolutely redundant.
Result
With the implementation of Peplink routers and access points, the mining company was able to achieve a completely autonomous mining plant. By utilizing SpeedFusion bonding technology, the network was able to run without any hiccups, regardless of whether the traffic was being sent to a public or private network. Ultimately, the connection signal strength for all IoT devices reached an all-time high, and the network was more reliable than ever before. Here, the power of a complete Peplink ecosystem was on full display.
Deployment
- Installed inside the self-driving vehicles
- Dual-cellular device capable of Hot Failover from MPLS to LTE
- Rugged metal enclosure with wide operating temperature
- Supports Wi-Fi 6
- Flexible power input options
- Installed all around the mining plant
- Increased signal coverage
- Faster speeds with Wi-Fi 6
- AP beacon functionality reduces time taken for WAN health checks
- 4×4 MU-MIMO offering uninterrupted data transmission