Smart Street Lighting System

We are aiming towards a new framework for the Smart Cities. Here outlining the Smart Street Lighting System is due to the immense power consumption of the present lighting system. Street Light provision is one of the most expensive but important responsibilities of city lighting which accounts for about 10-38% of the total energy bill in typical cities worldwide. Smart street Lighting system is a project on intelligent illumination control of street lights over LoRaWAN and the illumination of the streets, late in the night. The present/conventional time street lightning is facing many challenges in terms of manPower engagement for Road Lights. In sunny and rainy days, ON and OFF time differ discernibly which is one of the significant hindrances of the present street lights systems. Conventional street lighting systems are on most of the day without purpose because these are operated manually and the consequence is that a large amount of power is wasted meaninglessly.

With the rising adaptability of lighting innovation like Light Emitting Diode (LED) lights and all over accessible remote web association, quick responses, hassle free working, and power moderation factor, increases the success rate to showcase the Smart Street Lighting framework.

 The plan of an automated LoRaWAN based lighting framework which focuses on the saving of power, to construct a vitally energy efficient smart lighting framework with integrated sensors and controllers, which makes the system more user friendly and that requires less involvement of manpower.

All the automations can be made possible via LoRaWAN. LoRa means Long Range, this technology enables connectivity, real-time analytics, reporting, and additional functions such as geolocation. It penetrates in dense urban and deep indoor environments, connecting to sensors which are about 15-30 miles away in rural areas, enables multi-year battery lifetime, supports millions of message per base station, helps tracking application without the use of GPS or additional cause for power consumption, LoRaWAN specification ensures interoperability between different applications, Internet of Things (IoT) solution providers and telecom operators, embedded end to end AES-128 encryption of data ensuring optimal privacy and protection & reduces upfront infrastructure investments, as well as operating and end-node costs.

Steps involved in this model are:

(a) Street Light Controller embedded with each street light have the ability to control light functions.

(b) LoRa Technology in the controller channelizes the communication between the street light to LoRa-based Gateway.

(c) The gateway communicates with the cloud where the data is analyzed & processed by an application server.

(d) Application server monitors & controls lighting system.

(e) The server sends maintenance alerts.

There are various applications where this system can be efficiently planned. For example: If any of the Organization want to automate lights such that they would have schedules for operation, faulty light detection, and events & alerts for various parameters. They also have multiple solutions consists of single and three phase Feeder Panels as well including Street Light Controller unit which can be easily mounted on Light Poles, that would also connect to the Internet to give remote monitoring and control capabilities.

Light Controlling Unit (Street Light Controller Unit)

This controller is having feature to control streetlights through ambient light, commands, scheduling etc. With these features this retrofit street light controller makes streetlight smarter. This controller has LoRa module, through which this controller makes two-way communication. Gateway will work as a mediator between Street light controller and server. A user can send command to streetlight through application to control streetlight. This controller has unique MAC address through which we can map with location.

 Feeder panel (Remote Feeder Control Unit)

The feeder panel can control either single or three phases at a time. On board storage allows the feeder panel to store data collected from each phase, alerts & events detected, and the schedules set by supervisor. This helps in eliminating the need for continuous Internet connection for the solution to work. The feeder panel also houses energy meters per phase, in order to keep track of how much energy is being consumed.

Use LoRaWAN network in smart street-light system certainly change the way of billing and maintenance additionally providing long distance wireless communication. Finally, we can conclude that the system provides 50 - 60% of saving in energy bill.