Incentives for a Softwarization of Wind Park Communication Networks

Abstract

Wind energy is one of the most attractive and one of the fastest growing sources of green energy in the world. With the expansion of wind parks, there is a growing need for an efficient coordination of the diverse energy production systems, as well as a tighter coupling between the production and the consumer side of the grid. Current grid operators suffer unnecessarily high costs due to the lack of an integrated management system towards diverse set of proprietary network protocols, complex and error prone operation of the networks, as well as the rigid security mechanisms. Network softwarization concepts, i.e., Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), offer a great potential for reducing capital and operational expenditures by providing simplified network management and automated control. Recent works have demonstrated the feasibility of achieving stringent industrial-grade quality of service and fine grain security control with SDN and NFV. In this article, we provide an insight into wind park communication network requirements, analyze the technological benefits of the network softwarization, and demonstrate the economic profits in a case study of a typical Northwestern Europe wind park. I. INTRODUCTION ind energy is one of the most affordable and fastest growing sources of renewable energy, with more than 500 GW of installed capacity worldwide in the past 20 years. Incentives from national governments, as well as the ones proposed through the Renewable Energy Directive by European Commission targeting at covering 20% of energy needs with renewables by 2020, further promote the widespread adoption of green power plants. As the number of installed wind parks is rapidly increasing, there is a need for their tighter coupling and the efficient coordination of energy production schedules [1]. Smart Grids, which are considered as a promising solution for the integration of a diverse set of energy production and distribution systems, require deep penetration of ICT technologies in all of its subsystems. However, current wind parks are not yet prepared for a seamless integration into the Smart Grids, mainly due to the lack of mechanisms for automated and secure exchange of information [2]. Industrial communication networks, such as the one in wind parks, which in the past have been developed as closed systems, rely on closed proprietary protocol stacks, which have been tailored and optimized for their particular requirements.

DASON: Dependability Assessment Framework for Imperfect Distributed SDN Implementations

“…The goal of this study is to provide high fidelity models that can reproduce the stochastic behaviour of real-life distributed SDN platforms. Such models are needed in order to identify dependability bottlenecks, and reliably assess whether SDN solutions are ready to be deployed in a particular use-case scenario, such as industrial networks [6]. The controllers in our study are Open Network Operating System (ONOS) [7] and OpenDaylight (ODL) [8], two of the largest production-grade open source SDN orchestration platforms, whose code internals and bug repository are publicly available, allowing us to perform an in-depth dependability assessment.…”

“…In small resource-constrained networks, such as industrial networks [6], the network operator may choose to run the cluster of controller nodes on shared physical machines. Deploying the controllers in separate virtual machines (VM) provides better isolation between software instances, but introduces additional overhead, since every instance runs its own operating system.…”

Wireless Network Architecture for Cyber Physical Wind Energy System

“…The monitoring parameters include vibration, current, voltage, temperature, rotor speed, wind speed, wind direction, tower movement and atmospheric pressure. Authors in [12] discussed the wind farm communication network based on software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). This work demonstrated the economic profits for the proposed solution compared to the conventional Ethernet-based architectures considering a case study of a WPF in Northwestern Europe.…”

“…Considering previous research work, most research articles studied the communication networks for WPFs where researchers focused on describing the communication solutions used in real wind farm projects [5]- [9], while others studied the feasibility of a single wired/wireless solution inside wind turbine [10], [11] or among wind turbines and the control center [12]- [14]. However, there is limited research work and a knowledge gap related to the design of WPF communication networks, where the assumptions in available articles with few sensor nodes do not represent the complete monitoring data from WPF subsystems including turbines, meteorological towers and substations.…”

Loko

“…At the same time, small networks can still benefit from emerging flexible communication technologies, and in particular programmability, to overcome limitations of existing solutions. Indeed, programmability, which we use as a generic term to refer to reconfigurable forwarding behavior at runtime (e.g., OpenFlow or P4), and centralized control can offer faster and more fine-grained control than proprietary solutions like Profibus or CAN which require specialized hardware to enable deterministic guarantees [14,54,64]. We define "small networks" as networks of low capacity that connect small, lightweight, and low-cost equipment.…”