Online monitoring of power data through wireless sensor network

Abstract

Transmission of electricity from thermal power plants to areas like villages in hilly terrains, villages in dense forests and highly rural and inaccessible areas incurs high losses. Some of those areas with renewable energy potential are thus presently getting dependant on renewable sources of energy to obtain electricity. But, monitoring the performance of these renewable sources of energy from a control station situated far away in the city by the help of wires becomes hazardous. Hence, wireless sensor networks have come up as an alternative monitoring tool. In this paper, a laboratory prototype set up of a solar panel has been developed and the output data from the solar panel has been monitored using wireless sensor network. The data transmission takes place over a certain distance in multipath network architecture following a shortest path algorithm. This prototype can be utilized for long distance data transmission with error of about 1-2%. Reliability in transmission is obtained by the help of multi-path architecture, since the parameters are continued to be monitored even when a fault is introduced in one path.