Communication Network Architectures for Smart-Wind Power Farms

Developments in the wind power industry have enabled a new generation of wind turbines with longer blades, taller towers, higher efficiency, and lower maintenance costs due to the maturity of related technologies. Nevertheless, wind turbines are still blind machines because the control center is responsible for managing and controlling individual wind turbines that are turned on or off according to demand for electricity. In this paper, we propose a communication network architecture for smart-wind power farms (Smart-WPFs). The proposed architecture is designed for wind turbines to communicate directly and share sensing data in order to maximize power generation, WPF availability, and turbine efficiency. We also designed a sensor data frame structure to carry sensing data from different wind turbine parts such as the rotor, transformer, nacelle, etc. The data frame includes a logical node ID (LNID), sensor node ID (SNID), sensor type (ST), and sensor data based on the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61400-25 standard. We present an analytical model that describes upstream traffic between the wind turbines and the control center. Using a queueing theory approach, the upstream traffic is evaluated in view of bandwidth utilization and average queuing delay. The performance of the proposed network architectures are evaluated by using analytical and simulation models.