Street Light Explainer Part II: Communication Networks

A central management software is fundamental to a smart streetlight system, allowing cities and utilities to remotely manage and control the lights. The software is synced with a streetlight using a light point controller, a piece of hardware placed on top of a light. Cities connect the lights system using a communication network. This is a look at the three types of systems on the market. The first category of systems are running on power line communication using the power cable to communicate all the data to a cabinet and then to a central management software. This one applies only for in Europe and in Asia where the streetlight network, the power network, is actually dedicated to streetlight. and then lights behind. The powerline injector, the device that communicates all the powerline, is in the cabinet. If you don't have a cabinet, of course you cannot run such a system. It doesn't apply to the US, to the UK and to Australia. The second kind of network is the cellular network and with this one, I mean it's great, you have it everywhere. 3G communication is everywhere. It is as if you have a SIM card inside. inside each luminaire controller. Actually, most of the system today are not using really 3G, but rather LTE-M or CAT-M1 or NB-IoT, which are new cellular technologies using exactly the same cellular network. The challenge with that one is mainly on the price. If the telecom operators can run, can provide subscription at like $1 per year, per device, per streetlight, then it could... right because for a streetlight that is consuming 50 to 70 dollars of energy every year if you pay like 10 dollars of communication just to control it of course that will be a bit pricey and the third one is what we call fan field application network there are two kinds of field application network the star network one gateway connecting to each devices and the gateway being the gateway between the software and the end devices some of the gateways like in the technology, in the LoRaWAN technology, these gateways and this network can be reused for other purposes, for other smart city use case. And mesh network, where you have devices talking to other devices to bring one message from one device up to the central management software through other devices around. For mesh network, same story, it can also be used for other purposes. The only problem with the mesh network we have the market today is most of them are proprietary network two categories here again long range sub gigahertz network which can cover kilometers of communication limited number of infrastructure to make them run and short range typically zigbee which is clearly an open system but very short range a lot of gateways to install to make that system Thank you. Where is the market going? And there are really two trends. The first one is on the easiness of installation, how easy it is to deploy systems. And clearly, cellular networks are most probably the easiest type of system to install. Put a streetlight with a luminaire controller on top of it, it connects to the cellular network and it works. It commissions itself, we call that auto -commissioning, to the central management software and it works. one trend the other trend is also to go for interoperability and here there are quite some players who are offering starting to offer interoperable systems with multiple manufacturers on one fan network all of them being interchangeable the one to the other these kinds of this kind of systems are also extending quite nicely on the market so clearly the trend will be for interoperability now that question can be discussed in further details in the future.