Latency-guaranteed online anti-jamming routing and distributed power control for wireless heliostat fields

Abstract

Wireless connectivity can substantially reduce the deployment and maintenance cost of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) fields, but it also exposes their control infrastructure to radio-frequency jamming. A successful attack can interrupt heliostat coordination, reduce energy harvesting, and, in extreme cases, threaten field safety through uncontrolled solar concentration. In this paper, we introduce a jamming-resilient communication framework for CSP field. The proposed framework enables the wireless heliostats’ autonomous joint selection of multi-hop routes and transmission powers. The corresponding optimization problem is mixed-integer and non-convex. Thus, a practical three-layer anti-jamming mechanism is developed. Initially, the routes with low delay and jamming exposure are identified, then, the transmission power for the candidate routes is optimized, and finally, the best feasible route–power pair is selected. Detailed simulation-based experiments are performed in a commercialscale CSP field with 7,683 heliostats. The results show that the proposed anti-jamming mechanism preserves the required Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR), while achieving low latency and energy consumption, compared to shortest-path baselines as a mobile jammer crosses the field.