Low-cost Hierarchical Monitoring System for Solar Photovoltaic Systems

In this paper, the proposed monitoring system adopts a hierarchical configuration, in which the low complexity sensing node measures voltage, current and temperature data of each PV cell and the high complexity sensing node analyze data from the low complexity sensing nodes. According to the experimental results, the proposed monitoring system improves data efficiency by 30% by removing unnecessary data transmission, and reduces total building cost more than 40% by employing a mix of many low-end and few high-end sensing nodes. In addition, the proposed monitoring system can quickly detect and identify the impaired PV solar cell within whole PV system.