Chapter 1 Introduction1.1 RationaleRecently, wind energy has gained more attention than renewable energy sources due to the maturity of the technology and its relative cost competitiveness. Wind farms (WPF) are spread across remote areas (onshore and offshore) selected based on wind speed, water depth and distance from the coast. It is important to develop the technology to monitor WPFs with higher capacities as the size and number of wind turbines in a WPF is continually increasing. To provide real-time control and monitoring, a reliable two-way communication infrastructure is required. According to their needs, most turbine manufacturers have developed their own monitoring and control systems due to the absence of a unified communication architecture. System performance with respect to control and monitoring depends primarily on communication capabilities that support the exchange of real-time monitoring data between control centers and WPFs. Given the importance of the WPF communication infrastructure, the network should be able to continue functioning even in the event of device/link failure. Therefore, the WPF communication infrastructure requires high stability and reliability to effectively control wind turbines and monitor local conditions. Furthermore, the communication infrastructure should meet the bandwidth and latency requirements for proper data exchange and proper operation of the wind turbines and control center. Conventional WPF communication infrastructure is a switch-based architecture, where independent sets of switches and communication links are used for different purposes. network applications including wind turbine generator networks, protection and control networks and telephony... half of the document... enter the network) in more detail. It mainly focuses on traffic modeling for different subnets. Finally, the proposed network models are evaluated through OPNET simulation for small, medium and large scale WPFs. Chapter 4 studies the EPON-based network architecture for WPF. First, several EPON-based WPF topologies are proposed, and then various protection schemes are considered to increase the network reliability. Optical power budget analysis, reliability analysis, and network cost analysis are evaluated through numerical analysis and compared with conventional switch-based architectures for small-, medium-, and large-scale WPF. Chapter 5 studies the communication architectures for Smart-WPF. Hybrid communication architectures for both wireless and wired solutions are proposed and evaluated through numerical analyzes and simulations.