Flying Base Stations for Offshore Wind Farm Monitoring and Control: Holistic Performance Evaluation and Optimization

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of flying base stations for offshore wind farm monitoring, developing a comprehensive latency model and optimization framework to improve real-time communication and control in harsh environments.

Contribution

It introduces a holistic latency model and a multi-objective optimization framework for deploying flying base stations in offshore wind farms, addressing real-time monitoring challenges.

Findings

Effective latency minimization demonstrated through simulations

Outperforms baseline designs in efficiency and latency reduction

Applicable to large-scale offshore wind farm deployments

Abstract

Ensuring reliable and low-latency communication in offshore wind farms is critical for efficient monitoring and control, yet remains challenging due to the harsh environment and lack of infrastructure. This paper investigates a flying base station (FBS) approach for wide-area monitoring and control in the UK Hornsea offshore wind farm project. By leveraging mobile, flexible FBS platforms in the remote and harsh offshore environment, the proposed system offers real-time connectivity for turbines without the need for deploying permanent infrastructure at the sea. We develop a detailed and practical end-to-end latency model accounting for five key factors: flight duration, connection establishment, turbine state information upload, computational delay, and control transmission, to provide a holistic perspective often missing in prior studies. Furthermore, we combine trajectory planning, beamforming, and resource allocation into a multi-objective optimization framework for the overall latency minimization, specifically designed for large-scale offshore wind farm deployments. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed method in minimizing latency and enhancing efficiency in FBS-assisted offshore monitoring across various power levels, while consistently outperforming baseline designs.