Smart Street Lighting

Smart Street Lighting with Wireless Security and Scalability

Why Smart Street Lighting?

Street lighting has an instrumental effect on cities’ safety, economy, and how citizens experience living in their city. However, the energy consumed for street lighting is a major expenditure. According to the World Bank, it constitutes up to 65% of a city’s electricity costs and 10% of its overall budget. The demand for lighting is growing significantly due to rapid urbanization, thus eating up even more energy and money - unless smarter solutions are deployed to reduce costs.

What is Smart Street Lighting?    

Smart street lighting combines energy-efficient, long-life LED luminaires with sensors and wireless connectivity. The cities can remotely manage, monitor, and control lighting on roads, streets, parks, and plazas via a single dashboard.

Lights can automatically switch on and off or dim based on the level of natural light. Luminaires with motion sensors switch on automatically upon a person or vehicle approaching. Accidents can override schedules to turn on lights at an emergency area.

Smart street lighting typically covers large urban areas with a dense grid of line-powered luminaires. This provides a  reliable infrastructure for other IoT capabilities, too - such as smart waste bins, parking meters, and air quality sensors.

Benefits of Smart Street Lighting

Smart street lighting provides cities with several benefits:

• LED lighting reduces energy consumption by up to 70% compared to traditional luminaires. When enhanced with automated smart lighting control, a total energy saving of up to 80% can be reached, allowing cities to reduce operational costs and carbon footprint.  
• Increases maintenance efficiency and resource allocation by automatically notifying of faulty luminaires and ordering timely repair visits.   
• Enables automated remote lighting control, and scheduling to deliver the right level of luminosity at each location based on e.g., day light, occupancy, or time of day. 

Silicon Labs Solutions for Smart Street Lighting

Silicon Labs offers industry leading MCUs (microcontroller units), wireless chipsets, software, and development tools for Wi-SUN and Proprietary protocols. With Silicon Labs, you can enable the smart city lighting devices with the broadest selection of hardware, innovative wireless software, and the most robust security.

What to Consider when Designing Smart Street Lighting?

How to Develop a Scalable Smart Street Lighting System?

As urban areas are expanding continuously, the smart lighting networks must scale accordingly. Wi-SUN mesh networking provides the most scalable wireless connectivity technology for smart city applications including street lighting – enabling cities to deploy and  scale to hundreds of thousands of luminaires cost-efficiently.   

Enabling a Vendor-Agnostic Ecosystem 

Interoperability is a crucial driver for cities to economically expand smart street lights from one zone to another. Wi-SUN enables multi-vendor interoperability, vendor competition, and customer choice for streetlighting hardware and system solutions. Cities are not locked into a single vendor, thereby increasing their strategic lever and reducing the total cost ownership. 

Smart Street Lighting Security

Security is a critical design consideration in smart street lighting. Any device plugged into the municipal network can potentially expose the public infrastructure to hackers. The Silicon Labs hardware and software are secured at all levels to safeguard your devices against the most sophisticated logical, physical, and wireless attacks. Our Secure Vault firmware enabled the world’s first wireless SoCs to achieve PSA Certified Level 3 certification. Wi-SUN includes an integrated public key infrastructure to only allow authenticated nodes to join the network.

High Throughput, Low latency Connectivity

Smart street lighting luminaires require high-throughput wireless connectivity for low-latency connections to the control center. Silicon Labs provides wireless chipsets that are purpose-built for high throughput with excellent high RF sensitivity for long range.