A Novel Cost Minimizing Strategy for Cooperative Relay and Edge-Computing-Based Wind Power Communication Network

Wind power frequency regulation relies on reliable communication between wind farms and power dispatch center (PDC), which is critical for ensuring the accuracy of frequency regulation. However, data transmission errors and delays may lead to deviations in control commands, increasing the reliance on ancillary services and thereby raising the operational costs of PDC. Therefore, this paper proposes a communication-enhancing strategy that integrates cooperative relay and edge computing (CRE) to improve communication reliability. Edge node (EN) devices with computational capabilities are employed as relays to enable data preprocessing at edge-side. Furthermore, a bandwidth compression model is developed based on Amdahl’s law, hardware constraints of EN, and thermal wall effect, to characterize the coupling between computing power and bandwidth and support efficient resource allocation. On this basis, a cost model incorporating packet loss, frequency regulation response time, and control errors is established, and the cost minimization problem is formulated as a Stackelberg game to jointly optimize resource allocation and pricing strategy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy improves resource utilization efficiency. Compared with benchmark schemes, it reduces the total cost of PDC by 33.82% and increases the profit of EN by 21.53%, while exhibiting strong scalability across different wind farm scales.