Seasonal Dynamics of Wireless Communications in Concentrated Solar Power Fields

Wireless communication systems contribute to the design of next-generation Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) fields by enabling cost-effective real-time control of the heliostats. However, their performance remains vulnerable to the seasonal environmental dynamics which can impact the real-time communication of the heliostats with the central station. This paper investigates how the changing solar geometries across the seasons impact the wireless communication channel characteristics, the communication latency, and the CSP system's reliability in large-scale deployments. We propose a novel wireless communication architecture leveraging the Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) technology along with a dynamic bandwidth splitting and an adaptive clustering mechanism in order to address the impact of the seasonal dynamics on the wireless communication in the CSP fields. Detailed emulation-based experiments on a 7,683-heliostat field demonstrate significant seasonal performance variations with less than 1% higher communication latency during the winter period and 40% longer total autocalibration durations compared to the summer operations. The experiments reveal that these effects stem primarily from the degraded Line-of-Sight (Los) wireless communications conditions during the winter period and the reduced Direct Normal Irradiance availability.