Design of Satellite Network-Based Remote Control and Monitoring System for Power Plants

Abstract

Satellite technology plays an important role in providing disaster relief and rural telecommunications infrastructure. Since the main repeaters sending and receiving signals are located outside the Earth's atmosphere, the satellites are only wireless communications infrastructure not susceptible to damage from disasters. In this paper, we propose a real-time remote control and monitoring system for power plants via satellite communications. The proposed system provides two types of traffic: priority traffic and best-effort traffic. The priority traffic such as control and audio signals supports quality of service (QoS) and is carried by high-performance and flexible protocol (HpFP). On the other hands, the best-effort traffic such as image/video for monitoring and data files does not support QoS and is carried by conventional transport protocols. The HpFP maintains the throughput of traffic by its target throughput. We evaluate our system in real environment. The results show that the proposed system is able to be used effectively in monitoring and controlling of substations and stations during a major network failure.