Recent technological advances have led to an increase in the carbon footprint. Energy efficiency in the Internet of Things (IoT) has been attracting a lot of attention from researchers and designers over the last couple of years, paving the way for an emerging area called green IoT. There are various aspects (such as key enablers, communications, services, and applications) of IoT, where efficient utilization of energy is needed to enable a green IoT environment. We explore and discuss how the various enabling technologies (such as the Internet, smart objects, sensors, etc.) can be efficiently deployed to achieve a green IoT. Furthermore, we also review various IoT applications, projects and standardization efforts that are currently under way. Finally, we identify some of the emerging challenges that need to be addressed in the future to enable a green IoT.

Enabling Technologies for Green Internet of Things

Lighting, both indoor and outdoor, consumes a substantial amount of energy, making improved efficiency a significant challenge. A promising approach to address outdoor lighting is the smart control of public lighting. Smart lighting using electronically controlled light-emitting diode (LED) lights for adaptable illumination and monitoring is being used to achieve an energy efficient system. However, the traffic engineering integrated with smart control for energy optimization has not been widely used. In this paper, a novel concept of traffic-flow-based smart (LED) street lighting for energy optimization is proposed. The developed smart grid architecture-based system uses low power ZigBee mesh network to provide maximum energy efficiency in response to adaptive traffic on the road. Moreover, the scalable wireless network of smart LED lights offers improved reliability, reduced cost, and more user satisfaction. In order to validate the performance, the proposed system was implemented and tested in a real environment inside a university campus. Experimental results show that in comparison with the replaced conventional metal halide lighting, our system is capable of 68%–82% energy savings depending on the variations in daylight hours between summer and winter. A significant reduction in greenhouse gases, improved overall system reliability, and reduced maintenance due to smart control suggests promising results for future wide-area deployment.

Energy-Efficient Intelligent Street Lighting System Using Traffic-Adaptive Control

An efficient LED lamp that illuminates the street with high quality is presented. The luminaire shows high optical efficiency, high optical utilization factor, low glare, and illuminates the street with high uniformity. The concept is simple but effective: a cluster of LEDs with TIR lenses are put inside a reflective box, which is covered with a microlens sheet; the reflective cavity improves efficiency by light recycling; each TIR lens collimates the LED light for the microlens array; and the microlens sheet uniformly distributes light only into the street. We verify its feasibility by Monte Carlo ray-tracing for the main types of road lighting arrangements: central, zigzag, and single-side pole positions.

High-performance LED street lighting using microlens arrays

https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/378424/1/accepted_paper.pdf

A traffic-aware street lighting scheme for Smart Cities using autonomous networked sensors

Over the past few decades, the rate of urbanization has increased enormously. More enhanced services and applications are needed in urban areas to provide a better lifestyle. Smart city, which is a concept of interconnecting modern digital technologies in the context of a city, is a potential solution to enhance the quality and performance of urban services. With the introduction of Internet-of-Things (IoT) in the smart city, new opportunities have emerged to develop new services and integrate different application domains with each other using Information and Communication Technologies. However, to ensure seamless services in an IoT-enabled smart city environment, all the applications have to be maintained with limited energy resources. One of the core sectors that can be improved significantly by implementing IoT is the lighting system of a city since it consumes more energy than other parts of a city. In a smart city, the lighting system is integrated with advanced sensors and communication channels to obtain a Smart Lighting System (SLS). The goal of an SLS is to obtain an autonomous and more efficient lighting management system. In this paper, we provide an overview of the SLS and review different IoT-enabled communication protocols, which can be used to realize the SLS in the context of a smart city. Moreover, we analyzed different usage scenarios for IoT-enabled indoor and outdoor SLS and provide an analysis of the power consumption. Our results reveal that IoT-enabled smart lighting systems can reduce power consumption up to 33.33% in both indoor and outdoor settings. Finally, we discussed the future research directions in SLS in the smart city.

IoT-enabled smart lighting systems for smart cities

Purpose – Conventional street lighting systems in areas with a low frequency of passersby are online most of the night without purpose. The consequence is that a large amount of power is wasted meaninglessly. With the broad availability of flexible‐lighting technology like light‐emitting diode lamps and everywhere available wireless internet connection, fast reacting, reliably operating, and power‐conserving street lighting systems become reality. The purpose of this work is to describe the Smart Street Lighting (SSL) system, a first approach to accomplish the demand for flexible public lighting systems.Design/methodology/approach – This work presents the SSL system, a framework developed for a dynamic switching of street lamps based on pedestrians' locations and desired safety (or “fear”) zones. In the developed system prototype, each pedestrian is localized via his/her smartphone, periodically sending location and configuration information to the SSL server. For street lamp control, each and every lampp...

Reinhard Müllner

Papers

An energy efficient pedestrian aware Smart Street Lighting system