Energy-efficient street lighting through embedded adaptive intelligence

Streetlights place a heavy demand on electricity usage, providing significant financial and environmental burdens. Consequently, initiatives to reduce energy consumption have been proposed, usually by turning off or dimming the streetlight. In this paper, we propose an adaptive lighting scheme based on traffic sensing, which adaptively adjusts streetlight brightness based on current traffic conditions. The algorithm has been validated through simulation using the SUMO and OMNeT++ tools and, for two different geographical locations, the energy consumption evaluated with respect to traffic speed and volume. The simulation results presented indicate that the proposed lighting scheme can consume up to 30% less energy when compared to the state-of-the-art.