Resiliency in offshore wind farm communication networks

Wind energy is getting a considerable attention worldwide from the fraternity of the power system engineers as clean and green energy that can help reduce the carbon content and limit dependence on conventional fossil fuels. This has lead to the development of offshore wind farms in last few years. Real time monitoring and control of offshore wind farm require high speed, reliable, fault resilient, and cost effective communication infrastructure. The availability and reliability of wind energy mainly depend on resilient communication network. This can be achieved through a combination of redundancy and Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper, we have proposed fault resilient architecture of the medium scale offshore wind farm and simulated different fault scenarios based on IEC 61400-25 standard in OPNET. The wind farm communication is based on Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol. The performance has been analysed with respect to QoS in terms of latency, traffic drop, and traffic congestion. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4802945]