SMARTinfeld: Lighting Control with LoRaWAN

Process Requirements

In 2018, the municipality modernized a total of 98 street lamps along 3.5 kilometers of road. Operating the street lighting cost 6,000 euros per year. A conversion to LED technology should achieve energy savings of 60 to 70 percent. The use of a license-free LoRa network – the basis for the transmission of sensor data for demand-based lamp monitoring – is expected to save an additional five percent of operating costs.

Objectives

• Modernizing street lighting
• Achieving energy savings
• Reducing costs and emissions in the long term
• Realizing further applications in the LoRa network

Solution

Before the integration of the solution, citizens personally reported defective streetlights to the municipality. All 98 streetlights were converted to LED with an intelligent control system via LoRaWAN. Each luminaire now has its own LoRaWAN sensor. The implementation of a comprehensive LoRaWAN supports the targeted maintenance and individual control of the streetlights. Sensors detect defective lamps and control switching times of each individual lamp. The retrofitting costs for the overall solution – the integration of LED and LoRa technology – amount to 50,000 euros.

As part of the overall digitalization project in Martinfeld, the measuring stations of the public waste containers are also evaluated. Installed LoRaWAN IoT sensors detect fill levels and generate automatic messages to the waste collection service as soon as waste containers need to be emptied.

A third use case in the "SMARTinfeld" project: In order to use smart applications in agriculture, LoRaWAN-based sensors are used to periodically measure environmental conditions, including wind direction and strength, soil moisture, and parameters that provide information about water and air quality.

In the long term, the use of LoRaWAN technology in public spaces is expected to reduce investment and operating costs as well as energy consumption in order to reduce emissions. The transmission reliability of data communication in the Martinfeld LoRa network is around 98 percent.

Advantages

• Individual control of lighting times, for example at city festivals or in darkness due to weather conditions reduces energy consumption
• Targeted maintenance of street lighting reduces operating costs
• Low financial burden on the IoT infrastructure due to the use of license-free frequency bands
• Transmission reliability of around 98 percent
• Automatic reporting of errors and failures
• Energy efficiency in all implemented IoT applications

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