A Vehicle Movement Based Self-Organized Solar Powered Street Lighting

Abstract

Street lighting is an important part of our daily life. The amount of power consumed by street lighting shares a major energy demand. In conventional street lighting approach during night all street lights are on. It is assumed that the vehicles are passing over always. However, a part of zones can be consisting of lesser traffic density and even no vehicle moments occur in certain areas. To overcome this shortfall, a proper energy saving and lighting control mechanism should be employed. Although, there are plenty of lighting systems that have been proposed to give a control over lights, the proposed one is the most suitable for areas that have low traffic such as rural and remote areas. It has a potential to adapt the street lighting energy consumption in coherence with the traffic circulation. The idea is to employ a street lighting approach powered by the solar energy and controlled by using a sensors assembly with a front-end controller. The system self-organizes by controlling the lights based on the detection of vehicles movement. Only the concerned lights are turned on and all others remained off. It improves the system energy conservation compared to the counter classical approaches. As well as, the system has the ability to identify and specify status of each light on the street and return the light number and address to the maintenance in case of any failure occurred to any light. A system preliminary prototype is implemented. Results have shown proper system functionality.