Using IoT and smart monitoring devices to optimize the efficiency of large-scale distributed solar farms

摘要： This paper presents a novel IoT-based architecture that utilizes IoT hardware, software, and communication technologies to enable real-time monitoring and management of solar photovoltaic systems at large scales. The system enables stakeholders to remotely control and monitor the photovoltaic systems and evaluate the effect of various environmental factors such as weather, air quality, and soiling. The system was implemented and evaluated in terms of network delay and resource consumption. Message Queueing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) was used to facilitate wide-scale real-time communication. The average network delay was found to be less than 1 s, proving the architecture to be ideal for solar and smart grid monitoring systems. As for resource consumption, the evaluation showed the hardware to consume about 3% of the panel’s output, while the application also utilized a very small percentage of the CPU. This led to the conclusion that the proposed architecture is best deployed using low-cost constrained edge devices where a combination of IoT-based paradigm, efficient MQTT communication, and low resources consumption makes the system cost-effective and scalable.