Quality of Optical Channels in Wireless SCADA for Offshore Wind Farms

One of the most important features in the smart gird is to integrate the state-of-the-art communication technologies into power systems. In offshore wind farms, data communications would rely on wireless techniques. The wireless optical communication technology has several advantages over the RF counterpart. However, the impact of atmospheric turbulence on optical signals must be well understood first. In this paper, the performance of wireless optical links subject to weak influence is investigated. Three types of metrics (amount of fading, outage probability, and bit error rate) are analytically and numerically evaluated.