## 2 Related Work  
Due to the importance of communication in mining environments, wireless communication solutions have been developed and performance experiments have been conducted for different mining areas and categories in real mining environments [9]. Due to the costs of testing equipment, the unavailability of mining test sites, and the difficulty in experimental applications, practical mine test experimental results are wide and few, and this is especially true for underground gold and platinum mine slopes. In [10], an experimental study of the Line-of-Sight Millimetre-Wave Underground Mine Channel was conducted. In [11], experimental results for Zigbee in an underground mine are presented. The authors of [12] study Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna configurations for underground mine communication and present measurements for a gold mine. Ref. [13] presents experimental results obtained from narrowband and wideband radio-channel measurements in an underground mine at 2.4 GHz. Ref. [14] explores and tests a smart phone network for communicating sensor data from the underground production environment to the surface, in a tunnel, stope, and shaft. Power consumption is one of the major considerations for underground mine applications. The major drawbacks of high bandwidth wireless communications are that of high-power consumption as well as the inability to cope with excessive multipath propagation [15]. Low-power Wi-Fi6 systems have emerged as a potential candidate for the underground mine stope. Ref. [16] presented an empirical study of Wi-Fi performance where aerial-ground robots could be used to map, navigate, and search in an unknown underground environment in the experimental mine of the Colorado School of Mines. Laptops were used to represent the robots. The results show that the signal throughput drops significantly over large distances within line of sight and is non-existent around a corner. Ref. [17] performed measurements for mining Wi-Fi vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to be utilized in a tunnel to increase the safety and productivity of the transportation of mining goods. Furthermore, a signal performance analysis between COFDM [18] vs. Wi-Fi6 (IEEE 802.11 ax) [19] demonstrated the potential performance of Wi-Fi6 for the underground mine stope [5]. In [5], the Asus RT-AX53U Wi-Fi6 device was compared with the SOL8 SDR COFDM device. In this paper, Wi-Fi6 was shown to be more power efficient than the current industry standard of low power communications, IEEE 802.15.4 [8]. Even though Wi-Fi6 uses more peak power to transmit data, the total power consumed for sending data is much less due to the shorter transmission durations. The idle power consumption for both Wi-Fi6 and IEEE 802.15.4 (OpenThread [20]) were roughly the same. It is also important to incorporate a mesh topology for stope communications due to its ability to enable multiple pathways between nodes and ease of network extensions and strategic node placement. Furthermore, a critical component of mesh topologies is its mesh routing protocol. These protocols are generally summarized into reactive and proactive protocols. For proactive routing protocols, every node keeps a current list of routes, and examples include the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) [21] and Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) [22]. For reactive routing protocols, the routes are only set up when necessary, and examples include Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) [23] and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) [24]. In [25], the throughput of proactive routing was better than reactive routing with multipath fading. This research extends this by practically experimenting the performance of a decentralized proactive mesh routing protocol (B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced) vs. the hybrid approach of using both proactive and reactive routing (e.g., HWMP). For the highly regulated mining environment, where mining equipment is notably costly and typically vendor-controlled, there exists a compelling need for cost-effective alternatives to proprietary solutions.