A Survey of Wireless Communication Technologies for an IoT-connected Wind Farm

Wind Farms (WF) can be located in isolated areas, or they may comprise Wind Turbines (WTs) which are geographically distributed. Therefore, the neccesary communication infrastructure, required for the control and monitoring system, can be expensive to install and to maintain. In this paper, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are presented as solutions for these problems. WSNs are quick to install, easy to maintain and they scale up easily. The requirements for a potential WSN, for both a WT and a WF, are studied in this paper. Different wireless communication technologies are thoroughly compared. Both long-range low-power protocols and short-range high-speed ones are considered. A possible LoRa-based architecture of a WF communication system is presented.