SCADA Wireless Wide Area Networks

A supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) digital wireless wide area network (DWWAN) which is adapted to power utility grid has been designed with an architecture consisting of 56 nodes (28 links) stretching over a rugged mountainous zone. Simulation is conducted for design parameters such as tower heights, total antennas per tower, path loss, rain attenuation, hop lengths and power budgets that fulfill ITU standards for availability per year. Path profiles have been simulated employing a topographic database and Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of the designated node sites. The radio channel is assumed as a SDH digital path employing fixed or adaptive MQAM modulation scheme with Rician fading processes. The Rician fading channel equations are established for the symbol error rate and the spectral efficiency. Such networks can deliver channel capacities up to 2×155.52 Mbit/s per single frequency pair employing co-channel double polarization (orthogonal beams) with a bandwidth of 29 MHz and a gross spectral efficiency in the range of 5-11 bits/sec/Hz. This architecture gives network operators a spectrum efficient solution and can be integrated with mobile cellular backbone networks.