Lighting-Enabled Smart City Applications and Ecosystems Based on the IoT

The Internet of Things is poised to transform lighting from a simple illumination source, which is most often taken for granted, into a smart and data-rich infrastructure for the cities. To this end, we propose the Lighting-Enabled Smart City APplications and Ecosystems (LENSCAPEs) framework. LENSCAPEs involve i) city-wide wireless Outdoor Lighting Networks (OLNs), to connect the streetlights using either mesh, or cellular networks, ii) sensors, to collect heterogeneous spatiotemporal data about the city, iii) controllers, to actuate physical processes, such as lighting, and iv) other cloud-based applications, to process the data that is collected and disseminated by the city-wide wireless sensor network. Mesh-based networking technologies for OLNs, such as IEEE 802.15.4g, are evaluated by simulating network capacity and comparing with cellular technologies. Light-on-Demand (LoD), an adaptive energy-efficient lighting system based on wireless mesh networks, is presented as the primary application of small-scale OLNs. We also present a case study on a real-world deployment of LoD, which resulted in 92% energy savings over conventional luminaires.