Efficient transmission of wind turbine upstream traffic in EPON-based communication network

Recently, we proposed the EPON-based communication network architectures for large-scale wind power farms (WPFs). The proposed architectures offer robust, reliable, high speed and cost effective solution compared with conventional switched-based architectures. In this paper, we first introduce the proposed WPF communication network. Then, we design a sensor data frame structure to carry the sensing data from different wind turbine (WT) parts such as rotor, transformer, nacelle, etc. The data frame includes the logical node ID (LNID), sensor node ID (SNID), sensor type (ST) and sensor data based on IEC61400-25 standard. Fixed bandwidth allocation (FBA) is considered to enable each WT of transmitting its data efficiently within the allocated time slot. We present an analytical model that describes the upstream traffic between the WTs and the control center. Using queueing theory approach, the WT performance is evaluated in view of the bandwidth utilization, queue delay and queue length. In case of WPF, the proposed architecture eliminates the turbines traffic from transit through other WTs which improves the network reliability.