Towards a Software-Defined Industrial IoT-Edge Network for Next-Generation Offshore Wind Farms: State of the Art, Resilience, and Self-X Network and Service Management

Agrippina Mwangi, Rishikesh Sahay, Elena Fumagalli, Mikkel Gryning and Madeleine Gibescu ()
Additional contact information
Agrippina Mwangi: Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, 3584 CB Utrecht, The Netherlands
Rishikesh Sahay: College of Engineering, Technology and Management (ETM), Oregon Institute of Technology, Klamath Falls, OR 97601, USA
Elena Fumagalli: Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, 3584 CB Utrecht, The Netherlands
Mikkel Gryning: Ørsted Wind Power, Skærbæk, 7000 Fredericia, Denmark
Madeleine Gibescu: Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, 3584 CB Utrecht, The Netherlands

Energies, 2024, vol. 17, issue 12, 1-31

Abstract: Offshore wind farms are growing in complexity and size, expanding deeper into maritime environments to capture stronger and steadier wind energy. Like other domains in the energy sector, the wind energy domain is continuing to digitalize its systems by embracing Industry 4.0 technologies such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), virtualization, and edge computing to monitor and manage its critical infrastructure remotely. Adopting these technologies creates dynamic, scalable, and cost-effective data-acquisition systems. At the heart of these data-acquisition systems is a communication network that facilitates data transfer between communicating nodes. Given the challenges of configuring, managing, and troubleshooting large-scale communication networks, this review paper explores the adoption of the state-of-the-art software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) technologies in the design of next-generation offshore wind farm IIoT–Edge communication networks. While SDN and NFV technologies present a promising solution to address the challenges of these large-scale communication networks, this paper discusses the SDN/NFV-related performance, security, reliability, and scalability concerns, highlighting current mitigation strategies. Building on these mitigation strategies, the concept of resilience (that is, the ability to recover from component failures, attacks, and service interruptions) is given special attention. The paper highlights the self-X (self-configuring, self-healing, and self-optimizing) approaches that build resilience in the software-defined IIoT–Edge communication network architectures. These resilience approaches enable the network to autonomously adjust its configuration, self-repair during stochastic failures, and optimize performance in response to changing conditions. The paper concludes that resilient software-defined IIoT–Edge communication networks will play a big role in guaranteeing seamless next-generation offshore wind farm operations by facilitating critical, latency-sensitive data transfers.

Keywords: IIoT-Edge; software-defined networking; network function virtualization; ETSI AI-driven autonomous networks; IEC61850; IEC61400-25; publish/subscribe; resilience; offshore wind farms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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