A Cluster Based Data Transmission Scheme for Distributed Photovoltaic Systems

Since the prosperity of the photovoltaic power generation industry, how to reduce the cost of a matched operation and maintenance system has become a hot topic. In this paper, a cluster based data transmission scheme is proposed in order to reduce the overall energy consumption and traffic cost of the system. In the clustering strategy, a cluster head (inverter) is selected according to the distance to the smart sub station. For each neighbor node of the cluster head, it will join in the cluster if data transmission will consume less energy through the cluster head. The process will be iteratively run until all nodes have been clustered. We adopt an energy consumption model and traffic cost models of China Mobile and China Telecom to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. Simulation results show that traffic cost can be greatly reduced by using different data packages. The utmost reduction achieves over 75%. The energy consumption can be reduced about 15%, and it is affected by various factors including the density of the inverters and the values of parameters.