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Jennic

White Paper

TECHNOLOGY FOR A CHANGING WORLD

Intelligent street lighting

Intelligent street lighting technology has now matured, providing a cost-effective
approach to managing municipal street lighting.

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Jennic Ltd, Sheffield UK April, 2009

INTRODUCTION
The 4.4 million streetlights in the US ten largest metropolitan statistical areas use an estimated
3 billion kWh of electricity annually, producing the equivalent of 2.3 million metric tons of CO2. If
we could achieve a 50 percent reduction in power used, this amounts to a saving of
1.5 billion kWh or 1.1 million metric tons of CO2. (R. Grow white paper 23-03-08)
Times are changing for municipal lighting management, with greater public scrutiny. The key
drivers for change are:

Economic
Against a backdrop of global economic slowdown, funding is becoming limited. Streetlights are
among a citys most important and expensive assets, typically accounting for a third of its
electricity bill. With energy prices increasing, this is driving the demand for energy-conserving
technologies for municipal lighting. Maintenance costs are also increasing, with huge numbers
of lamps nearing the end of their serviceable life.

Environmental
The Kyoto Protocol compels signatory states to implement rigorous energy conservation
programs. This, in turn, puts pressure on municipal bodies to reduce their CO2 emissions. In
addition, ecologically minded governments are responding to the reports of light pollution
adversely affecting the nocturnal natural environment.

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INTELLIGENT LIGHTING
An intelligent outdoor lighting system can help local communities do their part in meeting this
global challenge. Intelligent lighting systems utilise the latest technologies to optimise the light
intensity according to the situation by dimming the lamp. All lamps can be communicated with,
so their condition can be assessed remotely and, if necessary, the lamp controlled remotely. The
key benefits are:

Reduced energy costs

No city can simply switch off its lights at night, so other measures are called for. Not every street
and road requires full illumination all the time. Therefore, depending on the site and situation, a
frequently feasible option is to dim lights, thereby striking a balance between economical goals
and citizens safety needs. Dimming lights by up to 50 percent is generally imperceptible to the
human eye and can show a 40 percent reduction in power use. Typically, lights would be
dimmed during non-peak activity times between 11pm and 5am.

Reduced greenhouse gas emissions

With the energy savings comes a corresponding reduction in your community's CO2 footprint.
Each saving of 1500 kWh reduces CO2 emissions by approximately 1 ton for mixed power
generation.

Reduced maintenance costs

By automatically monitoring the mortality curve of each lamp fixture in a streetlight network, you
can accurately predict lamp failures before they occur. This enables you to develop more
efficient and cost-effective maintenance scheduling. Also, by intelligent control of the lamp, you
can optimise the life-span.

Higher community satisfaction

With an intelligent streetlight system in place, you will be able to significantly improve the
performance, efficiency and reliability of the street lighting in your community. No longer do you
need to rely on public complaints and visual inspections after sunset to monitor streetlight
function and safety. Through its energy and maintenance reduction capabilities, you will also be
able to free up a large allocation of public funds that could then contribute towards other
community programs.

Fast payback
Intelligent streetlight systems are very cost-effective, with a typical payback period within five
years. By first replacing the oldest lamps that have the most inefficient technology, this period
can be shortened still further.

Information
Information is an increasingly valuable asset. If you can capture data on ambient temperature,
moisture, visibility, light intensity, rain and traffic density, you can further lower energy costs and
roll out new services for your customers. These innovative applications can add further value to
your intelligent lighting system.

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MATURE TECHNOLOGIES HAVE NOW CONVERGED

Until relatively recently, intelligent lighting networks have been small-scale systems utilising
expensive technologies and having a poor Return On Investment (ROI). This has made them
unsuitable for more general municipal lighting control. Many key technologies have now matured
to bring low-cost sustainable intelligent lighting.

Large radio networks

Previously, radio networks utilised expensive hardware and were unreliable in large network
configurations. Jennic manufacture wireless microcontrollers that are ideally suited to streetlight
control, with a very low cost-point and long transmission range. The license-free JenNet
networking software maintains the network structure, self-healing the network around any nodes
that may have suffered a fault. These networks can have up to 1000 nodes and will
automatically reform following any power disruptions. Further, with 16 radio channels, multiple
networks can co-exist together. The underlying protocols use internationally recognised
standards and the license-free 2.4GHz radio band is available across the world.

Network management centre

The control centre technology utilises a server to maintain the database of streetlights. Individual
streetlight networks can communicate with the data centre via a wide number of technologies
such as GPRS, GSM and Ethernet. These technologies form the standard approach to gathering
remote data. You can then monitor your streetlight networks from practically any location in the
world using a desktop PC and a connection to the Internet. All these technologies are now very
cost-effective to implement.

Lighting technology evolution

Lamp technology has been improving in efficiency and performance for the past 30 years. Lamp
control has become more efficient with the move from mechanical ballasts to electronic ballasts,
and the lamp technology has evolved from High Intensity Discharge (HID) Mercury vapour to
Sodium and metal halide. The recent developments in LED technology have resulted in a further
leap in efficiency.
LED street lighting technology has finally arrived, meeting standard regulations for
environmental challenges, as well as improving streetlight quality through features like reduced
glare and better colour rendering. Current LED solutions have a low power consumption of 67W
(Phillips Luxeon Rebel) and offer energy savings of as much as 52 percent over Mercury Vapour HID
and 26 percent over a sodium HID fixture (90W). LEDs have a much higher initial cost, but the
longer lifetime of 60000 hours translates into a 10- to 15-year lifetime, which is at least triple that
of HID lamps. This reduces maintenance costs and, combined with the energy savings, means
that municipalities can recoup the costs of a basic non-networked LED-based street lighting
installation in four to six years. LEDs also facilitate low-cost dimming control when compared to
the expense of adding dimmable electronic ballasts to HID lamps.

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JENNICS TECHNOLOGY FOR INTELLIGENT LIGHTING

Introduction
Jennic manufacture wireless microcontrollers, and have developed the JenNet networking
software which handles all the network traffic and manages network faults with a self-healing
mechanism. This software is now field-proven in very large networks.

How it works
The short range of wireless communication is overcome in a network by hopping messages up
and down the network. In this way, ranges of many tens of km can be achieved using low-cost
radio technology.
Streetlights are ideal for wireless communication because they have the height, which enables
wireless service coverage of 350m or more, and the spacing of streetlights means that many
lights are in range of each other. Hence, if a node were to fail, an alternative route could be
found. The streetlights must be powered, so this energy is also available for the wireless
streetlight controller.
An idealised network is shown below for a highway. The network selects the connections
automatically and would find the optimal route.

Figure 1: Typical Streetlight Network

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Each lamp controller communicates with the data centre via a gateway. Typically 500 streetlights
will be associated with one gateway. The network structure is a tree, which could be of any
shape. For example, long and thin for highways and dense bush shaped in car parking areas.
At the root of the tree is the gateway.
The network topology is handled automatically by the JenNet software, which maintains the
optimum network shape and will self-heal from any failures within the network. The street lighting
application simply submits and receives data packets from the network software, which will route
the messages to the appropriate destination.

Figure 2: Street Lighting System Components

The control centre will consist of a large database, with all the streetlights updating the database
every 15 minutes with sensor readings and lamp-life data. Using this data, the servers can
automatically dim some or all of the lamps by sending messages into the network.
The JenNet software was designed for lighting networks and has been optimised to handle the
recovery of long thin networks from faults, which present the greatest challenge to wireless
network design.
The Jennic JN5139 wireless microcontroller is a powerful 32-bit processor with comprehensive
on-chip peripherals, reducing the need for other chips and providing significant spare processing
power for executing value-added applications.

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KEY BENEFITS OF THE JENNIC SOLUTION

Lowest cost of ownership
A key factor when calculating the overall cost of a system is the ratio of lamps to gateways.
Gateways are the most expensive network components. Requiring GSM/GPRS or Ethernet
connectivity to provide the backhaul link to the data centre, every gateway carries an additional
service cost during its lifetime, for the line rental or data charge for the link to the data centre.
Hence, the greater the ratio of lamps to gateways, the more cost-effective the overall network
cost and the better the ROI. Jennics network offers a maximum ratio of 1000:1, with typical
networks operating at 500:1. This compares with other wireless networks that offer 250:1 and
power-line networks with only 50:1.

No hidden engineering costs

Power-line communication can also be used for forming streetlight networks, but this has
additional engineering costs. Streetlights can be on different power lines which are isolated. To
establish communication between different power lines, there is the added expense of paying
engineers to bridge power networks for cross communication.

No license costs
The JenNet software is license-free, so there are no additional costs per node, unlike with other
network software such as ZigBee.

Ease of installation
The only check you need to make is to ensure that you are in radio range of at least two other
streetlights in either direction. This ensures that if any node fails, you will be able to find an
alternative connection back to the gateway. Since most lights are in the line of sight of other
lights, this poses little problem when the radio has a range of at least 350m. In ideal conditions,
this can be over a kilometre.
The installer simply connects the new lamp fitting and no additional installer training is required.
The JenNet software automatically finds a connection to a local network, and is up and running
in seconds. If a NEMA-compatible fitting were used, this would allow for retrofit upgrades of
existing lights with NEMA light sensors.

Secure communications
The JenNet wireless protocol uses 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) security for
communications between the lamps and the gateway. Such is the strength of this standard, the
US Government announced in June 2003 that AES may be used to protect classified
information.

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Scalability
The JenNet wireless network is highly scalable. You can add nodes anywhere in the network
and the network software will look after the connections for you. If a network becomes full,
JenNet has features that allow seamless load balancing of the network, transferring lamps from
the heavily loaded network to a less loaded network.
You can roll out a system at a pace that is in line with your municipal street lighting budget and
resource constraints. For example, by replacing lamps at the end of their life and fixtures with the
highest operating costs (such as those with 250W or higher), you can benefit from immediate
energy savings while you wait for additional resources. Once the resources are available, you
can then continue to install the lamps in phases, allowing the network to automatically link in with
the initial lamps.

Global deployment
Jennics wireless communications use the 2.4GHz band, which is license-free and available
globally, so any product you develop utilising this technology requires no additional engineering
for overseas markets.

Future proof architecture

The JN5139 wireless microcontroller has very flexible signal control and could accommodate
any light sources, such as Light Emitting Diodes (LED) and electronic ballasts, as well as other
future light sources.

VALUE ADDED FEATURES

Once a wireless intelligent lighting system has been implemented, the infrastructure then exists
for value added features.

Lighting control opportunities

o

During an emergency, illuminate the area at maximum intensity.

Illuminate areas of road maintenance.

Give the Police control of localised street lighting to increase the safety of officers during
night-time operations.

Develop and implement adaptive-lighting protocols that will optimise the performance of
your street lighting network while maintaining your high level of public safety. Different
districts have different demands - for example, residential and commercial.

Increased energy savings

o

Pedestrian and traffic motion sensors to light a street on demand.

Pedestrian streetlight control via push-switch or mobile phone text message.

The use of an astronomical clock, to make best use of the light from the Sun and Moon.

Automatic dimming of streetlights based on the local weather and traffic density.

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Information management
o

Light performance auditing could reduce a citys liability exposure. For example, in the
event of a lawsuit brought against the city for an accident, the system can accurately
report the status and light output of any area by date and time of day.

Data collected from traffic sensors could feed into the traffic management system.

Data collected from temperature sensors could feed into highway maintenance
operations during cold weather, giving real-time thermal mapping of the network.

If GPS location data is entered into the database for each streetlight then by integrating
into a mapping system such as Google Earth or Microsoft MapPoint Server or your own
asset management system, you will be able to develop the most efficient routes for
predictive lamp maintenance.

If power usage is monitored at the street lamp then this data can be used for billing of the
electricity usage.

Further opportunities
o

Pole damage detection with the addition of a suitable sensor.

Taxi call buttons on lamp posts to signal to the network management centre to generate
a Taxi call to the appropriate location.

If the system has traffic speed sensors then this information could be used to manage
traffic speed via the dimming of the streetlights. If the average traffic speed is too fast
during evening and night hours, this could be used to trigger a slight dimming of the
streetlights. The level of dimming would be imperceptible to motorists but they would
slow down, regardless, in response to the slightly diminished lighting. A five percent light
reduction slows traffic but is not noticeable to motorists.

With the added intelligence in the lamp, you can add further features to increase HID
lamp life, such as softer start-up and protection against re-igniting an already hot HID
lamp, since this shortens the lamp life.

SUMMARY
The North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) estimates that demand for electricity in
the US will grow by over 19 percent during the next decade. Over the same period, electricity
generation is only projected to grow by 6 percent. The Brattle Group, in a recent analysis of
current and future electricity needs, observed that there is too little time to expand the nations
generating capacity. One opportunity to address the demand side of this issue is to save
electricity via the introduction of intelligent lighting technology to municipal street lighting. When
you consider that there are an estimated 55 million streetlights in the US, the savings could be
enormous.
Jennic offer a technical solution to the implementation of wireless intelligent street lighting
networks. The JenNet software running on the Jennic JN5139 wireless microcontroller provides
a very low-cost infrastructure for an intelligent street lighting network. Jennic have experience of
taking several intelligent lighting systems vendors to market, and as a result have developed a
reference design support package to accelerate the development of intelligent street lighting
systems.

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About Jennic
Jennic is a fabless semiconductor company leading the wireless connectivity revolution by
providing wireless microcontrollers for a broad range of applications. Its expertise in systems
and software combined with world class RF and digital chip design provides low cost, highly
integrated wireless microcontrollers with a focus on the IEEE802.15.4 and ZigBee standards.
The company's products include state-of-the-art low power wireless microcontrollers, modules,
development platforms, protocol and application software.
Founded in 1996, Jennic has its headquarters in Sheffield, England.

Company contact:
Email: fiona.davis@jennic.com

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Jennic

TECHNOLOGY FOR A CHANGING WORLD

Jennic Ltd
Furnival Street, Sheffield, S1 4QT, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 114 281 2655
Email: info@jennic.com

Fax: +44 (0) 114 281 2951

Web: www.jennic.com

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