B. Farm Area Network
There are two types of network infrastructures in the FAN; wired and wireless. Wired architecture is configured based on the electric power topology, where the optical fiber is embedded in the power cable. Wireless infrastructures are independent from the electric configuration. The EPON-based network architecture represents the wired configuration in this work, where the ONU is installed at the wind turbine side and the optical line terminal (OLT) is installed in the control center.
In order to share data among wind turbines or with the control center, the types of shared data should be determined. In real WPFs, meteorological mast is used as a source for weather forecast data to manage the WPF production. In this case, wind direction and wind speed are used for prediction of WPF availability and regulate the wind turbine speed. In [12], the wind farm meteorological mast contains wind vane, anemometer, barometer, temperature sensor and humidity sensor at different height. Table 1 shows the measuring requirements for meteorological data at each wind turbine and the calculated data rate for each sensor node.
In our network model, we considered the meteorological data in each wind turbine to be shared and forward to the control center, in order to achieve an accurate prediction of energy production for the WPF.