Abstract
The construction and running of hydropower plants does not merely involve hydropower generation itself but also facilities surveillance, water quality monitoring, harmful creatures tracking, etc., thus requiring mobile and collaborative monitoring capabilities. MANET (Mobile Ad Hoc Networks), with its mobility, flexibility, and robustness in volatile networking environment, is a competitive candidate to fulfill such tasks. Nevertheless its distributed structure prevents the effective collaboration between MANET nodes. SDN (Software-Defined Networking) provides the centralized control over the network underlay. This paper proposes the SDN-controlled IEEE 802.11 MANET swarm for mobile monitoring in hydropower plants. First, the MANET node is implemented by integrating Raspberry Pi with cameras, various sensors, etc., into the low-cost wheeled mobile hardware to enable sensibility and mobility. Then, multiple such MANET nodes are networked through ad hoc protocols, to construct a flexible and distributed MANET underlay; meanwhile, to implement centralized control over the MANET underlay, every MANET node is equipped with OpenFlow switch software (e.g., Open vSwitch) so that OpenFlow directives issued by the SDN controller can be understood and executed, hence the SDN overlay on top of the MANET underlay. Finally, OpenFlow is extended to offer physical actions such as mobility and sensibility manipulation, beyond pure data forwarding in traditional SDN applications, to achieve mobile monitoring in hydropower plants. The SDN-controlled MANET swarm features mobile and sensing capabilities, flexible networking through ad hoc protocols, and efficient and unified control by SDN. Experiment results prove the feasibility of this network architecture.
Highlights
Hydropower plays a key role in the energy industry
The prototype of the mobile ad hoc network (MANET) swarm is deployed in Shuanghe Hydropower Plant located in Dujiangyan, Sichuan Province, China, for these tests
Floodlight is deployed as the software-defined networking (SDN) controller, and Open vSwitch (OVS) is installed as the SDN data plane, to comprehensively build the SDN layer over every MANET swarm node
Summary
Hydropower plays a key role in the energy industry. The construction and running of hydropower plants does not merely involve hydropower generation itself due to the complex environmental and hydrological conditions they reside in. The construction and running of a hydropower plant might lead to ecological impact so that some rare species should be tracked for environmental impact evaluation (Q4) In such scenarios, a swarm of mobile nodes (such as unmanned aerial vehicles n1, n2, and n3) can be notified to patrol the target spot and adapt on-site formations (for example the triangle formation in the figure) for a better monitoring angle, to avoid obstacles, to track harmful creatures, etc., and transfer surveillance or damage report to administrators through long-range low-power communications so that facility loss can be controlled or even avoided at early stage. We propose the SDN-controlled IEEE 802.11 MANET swarm, an approach to construct a centralized SDN overlay on top of the distributed MANET underlay for mobile monitoring in hydropower plants.
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