$\mu\mathrm{C}$ -SDN: Micro Cloud-Software Defined Network Testbed for Onshore Wind Farm Network Recovery
Ammar K. Al Mhdawi, Hamed Saffa Al-Raweshidy · 2018
Wind power has become one of the leading clean and inexhaustible power sources of today's electricity generation. Wind turbines are significantly evolving with tremendous benefits, resulting in remarkable demand of installing and establishing new wind farms. One of the central dilemmas that face wind turbine is the unplanned downtime that considered to be one of the main revenue-loss factors of a modern wind farm [1]. In a medium scale wind farm, the sensor fiber network is subject to fail due to the harsh environment leading to corruption of the signals used for condition monitoring. Due to the reasons above, the wind turbine is subject to be shut down because of not received sensor data via the wind turbine health monitoring system. Additionally, the shutdown mostly is not required since there are no high threshold sensor values that are related to stress on specific turbine hardware. Thus, in this paper, we propose a software-defined Network (SDN) quadcopter system that is based on a cloud testbed cluster as an immediate fail-over recovery system for faulty sensors to provide continuous sensor readings with no interruptions. Our proposed system helps in preventing the unnecessary shutdown of a wind turbine which will result in continuous revenues with no losses and reduce any power shortage overhead that may affect the power grid. The SDN controller is virtualized on the cluster with full topology management on sensor nodes. We have used Real-time wind turbine sensor data to simulate the failure scenario and, extensive testing showed the reliability of our proposed SDN testbed to assess the wind turbine condition and to maintain continuous power generation.