Low-power WSN-based solar-cell monitoring system

Solar-cell systems have found a wide-range implementation area. However, a monitoring system becomes a must requirement to add to maintain the optimum performance of the system. Much research so far focuses only on the functionality of the monitoring system. This paper presents the design and implementation of a low-cost, low-power monitoring system based on a wireless sensor network (WSN) schema. A low-power monitoring system offers an additional advantage because it uses the battery power produced by the photovoltaic (PV) system itself. Being implemented on a streetlight solar-powered system, the results indicated that the designed monitoring system could perform efficiently. It helps the utility authorities to maintain and to manage the streetlights. Moreover, the proposed system only requires a small amount of power from the PV-cells battery.