Performance analysis of wireless sensor networks for wind turbine monitoring systems

Maintenance and monitoring of large wind turbines is difficult using manual process as turbines are installed in the wind farm located far from monitoring centers. Wireless sensor networks are used to automate the monitoring process for wind turbines. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of wireless sensor network for monitoring wind turbines. We consider different parameters such as total power used in sensing and reporting the data, sampling rate, channel bandwidth, number of channels and number of active sensors in a given channel while evaluating the performance of the sensor network that is used in wind turbine monitoring. To corroborate our analysis, we present numerical results obtained from simulations.