Building Resilience for SDN-Enabled IoT Networks in Offshore Renewable Energy Supply

Abstract

Resilient software-defined Internet of Things (SD-IoT) networks are critical in offshore renewable energy supply (such as offshore wind farms) for wide-area monitoring, protection, automation, and control (WAMPAC). Offshore wind farms transmit time-sensitive data about the turbine performance, power generation, environmental conditions, and critical equipment status to the wind farm offshore landing point or the remote control room. As such, there is a need to guarantee real-time communication to coordinate protection and control actions that maximize production and minimize inadvertent wind farm downtime. This research designs a deep Q-Network (DQN) resilience model that quickly detects disruptions and applies optimal traffic engineering actions at the software-defined network (SDN) controller to guarantee high performance. This resilience model improves the quality of service of the SDN-enabled IoT networks in offshore wind farm communication networks.