Wireless Sensor Network Applications for Smart and Energy Efficient Lighting: A Perspective of Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Cities

Abstract

The rapid growth in urbanization, and hence increased demand of energy in every domain has necessitated the rationale use of energy resources. Specially, the global efforts in reducing the environmental pollution due to increased use of energy has brought energy efficiency and smart sustainable communications at the heart of the global transition to a resource-efficient economy and realization of smart and sustainable strategies. Lighting both indoor and outdoor, consumes a substantial amount of energy, making improved efficiency a significant challenge and a potential area in order to achieve the well-sought objectives of energy efficiency and reduction in greenhouse gas emission. In this regard, the fast-paced advancement in information and communications technology (ICT) with the introduction of low-power and low-cost ubiquitous sensors are perceived to play a pivotal role in the future smart energy management networks and environmental friendly green cities. Specifically in lighting domain, the advent of solid state LED lighting has geared up a new revolution by not only providing energy efficient light source, but also giving an intelligent luminaire in illumination and occupancy control for dynamic demand based adaptable lighting. Moreover, the traffic engineering integrated with smart lighting control, which has not been implemented widely can be an important addition to this arena for highly energy efficient and sustainable lighting. In the area of outdoor lighting, public lighting represents the major part of energy spectrum. While in the area of indoor lighting, parking lights have the potential to offer great advantages in terms of energy savings, reduced pollution and cost savings. Therefore, in this dissertation, the novel concept of traffic flow based adaptive energy efficient lighting in both domains is proposed. In outdoor domain, intelligent LED street lighting optimizes the energy use by offering the traffic flow based adaptive lighting using wirelessly controlled, low-power and easy to implement ZigBee technology .The system is built upon the smart grid (SG) based architecture to offer advanced metering intfrastrucre (AMI) and demand response (DR) capabilities in order to save optimal amount of energy, reduced the hazardous gases to minimum level, and to be an integrated part of future smart cities. In order to validate the performance, the proposed system is implemented and tested in a real environment inside a university campus by replacing the old conventional lighting. Experimental results show that our proposed system is capable of saving 68 % to 82 % energy depending on the diurnal variations and changing operating hours between summer and winter, equally reducing the hazardous greenhouse (GHG) gases. The improved overall system reliability, increased system life time, and reduced maintenance due to smart control suggest promising results for future wide-area deployment. In indoor domain, the proposed smart lighting equipped with detection and image sensors adaptively controls the luminaires based on occupancy, that is, demand based on/off and dimming control according to changing status of the parking places. The system is analyzed using the survival analysis for parking free time for adaptive control of smart lights, which offers a sustainable system with significance energy savings up to 60%, reduced greenhouse gases and increased system life time. Moreover, the license plate recognition and central display unit provides better guidance, user satisfactions and improved security.