Wireless Network Architecture for Cyber Physical Wind Energy System

There is a growing interest to increase the grid integration of large-scale wind power farms (WPF). As most WPFs are located in remote areas where abundant wind resources are available, these sites are lacking communication infrastructures and network coverage which present major obstacles in enabling reliable data transmission between WPFs and their control centers. With the absence of unified communication network architecture, different vendors and manufacturers are developing their own monitoring and control solutions according to their needs. There is a knowledge gap related to the design of WPF communication networks, where the assumptions of available articles do not represent the complete monitoring data from WPF subsystems including wind turbines, meteorological towers and substations. This work aims to design a wireless network architecture for the grid integration of cyber physical wind energy system based on the IEC 61400-25 standard. The proposed architecture consists of four layers: a wind farm layer, a data acquisition layer, a communication network layer and an application layer. Wireless communication technologies outperform conventional wired-based solutions by offering lower costs, greater flexibility and easier deployment. Based on IEC 61400-25 standard, a wireless turbine area network is proposed for collecting sensing data from wind turbine parts, and connected to a wireless farm area network developed for communication between the remote control center and wind turbines. The network performance of the proposed wireless wind turbine internal network (includes the number of sensor nodes, data types and data size) is evaluated considering different wireless technologies (ZigBee, WiFi and WiMAX) in view of end-to-end delay, wireless channel capacity, and data loss. The simulation results show that wireless-based solutions can meet the delay requirements of the IEEE 1646 standard. This work contributes for building a redundant wireless communication infrastructure for remote monitoring of WPFs with scalable coverage and capacity.