On the application of cooperative communications in renewable energy sources for maximizing the reliability of power distribution networks

In this paper, the efficiency of cooperative communications in power distribution networks is investigated, where a number of renewable energy sources (RESs) are deployed. Specifically, any medium voltage (MV) bus of the power distribution network is considered as a wireless relay node where the information gathered from eachMVbus can be reliably transmitted to a control station for further processing. Therefore, the power distribution network can be equivalently considered as a cooperative communication network. The average bit error rate of the proposed cooperative diversity network is studied and a closedform lower bound is analytically derived. Numerical results corroborate the tightness of the proposed bound compared to the Monte Carlo simulations. The proposed wireless communication scheme enables the increase of the RES penetration level in distribution networks, improving so RES exploitation.