Street Lighting Control based on

LonWorks Power Line Communication

SungKwan Cho*, Vijay Dhingra**
*Echelon Korea Asia Pacific Ltd., 27F WTC Samsung-dong, Kangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea
scho@echelon.com
** Echelon Corporation, 550 Meridian Avenue, San Jose, CA 95126 USA
vdhingra@echelon.com

Besides being costly, streetlights contribute to air pollution.

Abstract—Public lighting managers have known that they could
lower the operating costs of their systems if they could cost
effectively collect the critical data needed to make better planning
decisions. Lighting engineers have conceived of new designs to
improve public safety and reduce energy consumption only to be
stymied by an inability to economically control every luminaire in
the system.
This paper describes street lighting control system based on
LonWorks[1] power line communication on demand market.
Keywords—LonWorks, Street lighting, PLC
I. THE NECESSITY OF STREET LIGHT CONTROL
The production of electricity needed to power street lighting
systems adds to carbon dioxide emissions (CO2 is the principal
“greenhouse gas”) and nuclear dust. Light pollution also has a
negative effect on the environment, impacting plants, animals,
and people’s sleeping habits. Table 1, provides an estimate of
electricity use and the associated CO2 emissions for some
areas.
The cost and environmental factors described above are
pushing cities to find solutions that reduce their streetlight
network costs while improving light efficiency and safety. The
rising price of electricity is, by itself, responsible for the
majority of the increase in streetlight operation budgets. It’s

S treet lighting is used to illuminate the roads we drive on, the

pedestrian paths we walk down, and the public areas where
we gather. It provides us with safe roads, stylish and inviting
now becoming strategic and compelling for cities to implement
solutions to measure, analyze, and reduce electricity use in
order to reduce energy spending, decrease maintenance costs,
public areas, and enhanced security in our homes, businesses challenge their electricity providers, and contribute to the
and city centers. Unfortunately, while traditional public reduction of CO2 emissions, as required by the Kyoto Protocol.
lighting systems provide significant benefits to all our lives,
they do so at significant expense to the community.
They’re usually very costly to operate, however, and they use
a lot of money that almost 40 percent of a city’s electricity
spending.
TABLE I
ESTIMATE OF ELECTRICITY USE AND ASSOCIATED CO2 EMISSIONS
Estimated
Estimated Annual
Location Estimated
Location and Annual CO2
and Number of
Number of Electricity Emissions
Number of KWh per
Residents Cost for due to
Residents Year
Streetlights Streetlights
(in tons)
> $18 > 150
U.S. > 68 million > 300 billion
billion million
II. THE ARCHITECTURE OF STREET LIGHTING CONTROL
European > $45.5 > 180
> 90 million > 450 billion
Union billion million The base architecture of street lighting system is shown in Fig.
> $650 1. The basic architecture consists of an intelligent ballast
U.K. 7.5 million > 4 billion > 1.9 million
million
$520 controller with LonWorks Power Line modem, a segment
France 8.6 million 5.3 billion 583,000 controller device (scheduling/control/data logging/access),
million
Los
> $17 power line routers, and software middle-ware that ties the
Angeles 220,000 > 100 million > 60,000
(U.S.)
million systems access devices back to service center applications. So,
Paris > $10.2 > $10.2 we recommend a monitored streetlight system based on the
170,000 > 80 million
(France) million million following components.

978-1-4244-1976-0/08/$25.00 ⓒ2008 IEEE. 396

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 A. A Power Line LonWorks node
Power Line LonWorks nodes must be able to measure and
send data such as lamp status, lamp level, accumulated energy
consumption of the streetlight, voltage, current, and cos φ (for
example, the ratio between active energy power and total
energy power) over the power line network using the
ANSI/EIA 709.1 protocol[2].
Power line communications bandwidth is a precious resource
for stable communication. Care must be taken in the design of
the ballast control nodes so that they do not saturate the
network. For this reason, LONMARK[3] certified nodes can be
configured to limit their bandwidth utilization. This degree of
configurability works well in a commercial building or
industrial environment where there are trained integrators
installing the system. In the street lighting environment, such
trained integrators may not be available, and it is desirable to
get a trial system installed and running very quickly with
minimal installer interaction.
The frequency of communications can be set and controlled to
eliminate the need for an integrator to configure each node due
to two factors – the ballast control nodes only initiate
communication on an alarm condition and the primary
functions of the system (energy savings and outage detection)
are pre-determined. For normal status updates, energy
consumption data, and other values, the ballast control nodes
wait to be polled by segment controller. In this way, power line
bandwidth is conserved so that the system design is not overly
sensitive to the number of nodes on a distribution transformer.
While it takes longer to poll more nodes, the information
coming from the polled communications transactions is not
time critical, so the polling can be done at a low duty cycle
leaving plenty of bandwidth available for higher priority tasks
such as prompt alarm condition reporting.
B. Street lighting segment controller
Streetlight segment controllers located in the feeder pillar. The
controller is the gateway between the central streetlight
monitoring software and the ballast nodes. Thus, streetlight
segment controllers must support standard communication
layers including TCP/IP over GPRS, ADSL, WiFi, and CDMA
and provide a standardized Web service interface(such as
XML/SOAP) to receive data, send commands, and configure
the streetlight controller’s services. The controller must provide
the following services within an integrated package:
(1) Bidirectional communication to the LonWorks node over
power line
(2) Historical datalog for several days
(3) Astronomical clock to send lamp switch commands at
dusk and dawn
(4) Scheduler for dimming commands
(5) Alarm notification to send messages of critical failures
The streetlight segment controller must support additional
protocols (such as Modbus) to communicate and control other
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types of devices (such as energy counters, door opening sensors,
or heaters) installed in the cabinet.
C. Street Lighting monitoring software
Streetlight monitoring software installed on a central computer
in a service center. This software serves as the data aggregator
for thousands of streetlight segment controllers. It must offer:
(1) Administration tools to make it easy to install and
configure electronic ballasts, Power Line LonWorks nodes, and
streetlight segment controllers.
(2) Data aggregation methods to calculate failure ratio,
business indicators, and energy consumption information.
(3) Intuitive end-user tools to let maintenance operators
quickly and easily identify lamp failures, display energy
consumption and other service-level business indicators, and
remotely control and command streetlights.
The software is a bridge between the streetlights and the city’s
(or the streetlight maintenance company’s) existing IT system
and business processes. Information from the streetlight
monitoring software can be leveraged by work-order
management applications as well as by energy billing
applications. The software also hides the technical complexity
of monitoring streetlights and limits the skills required of end
users and reduces installation costs.
With streetlight monitoring software that provides intuitive
streetlight maintenance and business reports through a
100-percent secured Web access to end users, streetlight
maintenance companies can give their customers an online
subscription to monitoring and business information including
service-level indicators.
III. INSTALLATION CASE
The architecture described above have been adopted by most
large streetlight maintenance companies in Europe and by most
integrators and cities in Austria, Canada, France, Germany,
Ireland, Norway, Spain, and the U.K.
Large cities such as Oslo, Norway and Milton Keynes, U.K
have reduced the overall costs associated with their streetlight
network by almost 50 percent, improve roadway safety, and
minimize maintenance costs. The installation in the Ville de
Quebec is saving 30 percent on energy use compared to the
previous system. [4].
 IV. CONCLUSION Also, we expect that more than half of the cities that evaluate a
Streetlights are a large consumer of energy for cities, using up LonWorks Power Line based streetlight monitoring solution
to 40 percent of a city’s energy budget. If every city installed, will deploy it and then further extend the network to other
proposed system, this would go a long way to reducing energy application domains within the next 24 months. LonWorks
use worldwide and therefore reducing CO2 levels. Power Line based streetlight monitoring solutions will become
The monitored streetlight market is now becoming a city monitoring solutions.
high-volume and high-value market In 2007, we expect that
150 additional European cities will install a monitored REFERENCES
streetlight pilot site involving LonWorks Power Line devices. [1] Echelon Corporation, “Introduction to the LonWork System,” Echelon
Corporation 1999.
In addition, 30 cities that piloted installations in 2006 will [2] ANSI/EIA-709.1, “Control Network Protocol Specification”.1998.
decide to deploy the solution and fully benefit from it. [3] http://www.lonmark.org
[4] http://www.echelon.com/company/press/oslolights.htm

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