Comparative Study of Advanced MPPT Strategies and Wireless Communication Technologies in Distributed Photovoltaic Systems

This paper presents an experimental comparative study of four advanced maximum power point tracking (MPPT) strategies—backstepping, adaptive backstepping, sliding mode control, and vision-based MPPT—combined with three wireless communication technologies: IEEE 802.15.4, Wi-Fi, and 3G. The comparison is performed on a distributed photovoltaic (PV) platform under common power-stage conditions in harmonized irradiance scenarios, including abrupt uniform-irradiance transients and controlled partial shading patterns. Under uniform irradiance, adaptive backstepping achieved the best overall dynamic behavior, with the shortest average convergence time of 0.045 s using IEEE 802.15.4, compared with 0.052 s for Wi-Fi and 0.115 s for 3G, while all tested configurations maintained tracking efficiencies above 98.8%. Under partial shading, the ranking changed substantially: the vision-based MPPT provided the best GMPP-oriented performance, reaching the highest tracking success rate and the lowest energy loss. In particular, its lost energy increased from 0.20% with IEEE 802.15.4 to 0.45% with 3G, whereas conventional backstepping increased from 0.65% to 1.35% over the same communication range. Latency measurements showed that IEEE 802.15.4 exhibited the lowest median end-to-end delay and the smallest dispersion, Wi-Fi showed intermediate behavior, and 3G introduced the largest latency and variability. The results demonstrate that MPPT performance in distributed PV systems depends on both the control strategy and the communication architecture and that a unified experimental assessment of both layers is required to identify the optimal MPPT–communication combination for each operating scenario.