Control network for modern street lighting systems

This paper proposes a control network for a LED street lighting system. The use of LEDs is being considered a promising solution to modern street lighting systems, due to their longer lifetime, higher luminous efficiency and higher CRI. The proposed control network enables disconnection of the street lighting system from the mains during peak load time, reducing its impact in the distributed power system automatically at overload conditions. It also allows to reduce the power consumption, decrease the management cost and monitor the status information of each street lighting unit. In order to meet the system requirements, a wireless sensor network based on IEEE 802.15.4™ standard is employed. Its network layer is implemented using geographic routing strategy, which provides low overhead and high scalability features. However, due to well known drawbacks of the existing techniques, a novel routing algorithm is proposed. Simulations show that this algorithm leads to a significant improvement of routing performance when applied to sparse large scale scenarios, which is the case of a street lighting system. Field tests have been performed on IEEE 802.15.4-compliant wireless control units. The obtained experimental results show that the proposed control network is able to meet the requirements of a LED street lighting system.