Connected Street Lighting Infrastructure for Smart City Applications

Street lighting is a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape, supporting both nighttime aesthetics and public safety. Street lighting is, however, a major component of electrical energy consumption and costs in outdoor municipal infrastructures. Advances in LED lighting and information and communication technologies are enabling greater energy savings, flexible lighting controls, sensor integration, and connectivity, leading to a new generation of connected street lighting systems. In this article, we consider a connected street lighting architecture for supporting smart city applications. Data models are proposed to provision device data, sensor data, and context data upon which system control and data application programming interfaces can be created. Finally, we present lighting applications and other smart city applications like environmental sensing, autonomous driving, and small cell networking that can be supported by the connected street lighting infrastructure.