Solar Powered Smart Street Light with Maintenance Service System

Introduction

Street light is necessary lighting system in many urban areas and in connecting highways. People have difficult vision on the road while driving during night time without street light. In certain areas, street light supports the businesses like night stalls and for people enjoying the night lives and view in cities and parks. Street light symbolizes of safety for many of us because walking at night in brighter place is safer than in a darker place.

There has been decades, where the existence of street light in urban areas. The first most modern street light implemented in Austrian Empire in 1853 (Scott, 1904). The street light is powered with the Kerosene but after some time the carbon arch lights substituted due to the risk of kerosene. The kerosene type of street light caused fire incidences in many places. For example in the year 1880 in New York, two of every five fire incidences are caused by kerosene powered street light (Caponetto, 2008). The carbon arc light has both the carbon-made electrodes and alternative current (AC) power in equal rates. The combination of carbon and AC powered in street light is the most widely used electric type street light and it is named as ‘First City of Light’ in Tamworth, New South Wales in Australia due to the first location to implement the arc lights as the city’s first street lights in 1888 (Liu, 2009). Although the carbon arc street light substituted with Kerosene Street light but it still has its disadvantages. Commonly it is not user friendly because the energy consumption of this type street light is poor therefore high usage of human resource to replace carbon rods, which works for very short period of time. The invention of incandescent light bulb an evolution takes place in street light design. The incandescent light bulb does not required a carbon electrode, just by heating filament in a high temperature with electric current, incandescent light bulb produces light without carbon electrodes. However the incandescent light bulb solves the insufficient of energy consumption in the carbon arc street light but 5% of energy used in visible light, which reduce the efficiency. Therefore, High Pressure Sodium (HPS) lights introduced in a street light design and it is widely used in many street light systems (Jherniak, 2012). HPS has high photopic in a least power consumption, which solves the inefficiency issue and hence making it a more reliable than the previous type of street light.

Today, most everything has build in wireless module to connect between things and the users conveniently. Mostly wireless communication service applied in SCADA telemetry control and process control system. The remote control device with infrared enable controls and establishes synchronization between devices in a short range. Global Positioning System (GPS) uses satellite to locate position in a globe. It is now clear that wireless communication changed the impression of telecommunication which is used to be difficult to install, expensive and sophisticated for establishing connection between any devices, human or equipments. Not only that, the wireless communication system changed people’s lifestyle and assured that the possibility to complete a task without extensive travelling. Therefore the wireless communication provides another opportunity for making street lights connected in a network structure for the purpose of managing and improving maintenance service which currently unavailable. Researchers have worked out few frameworks to have street lights connected to wireless communication medium like GPRS or GSM but the implementation costing will be burdening the city municipal council. Nodes are devices with the control mechanism and connectivity medium. Control nodes are implemented with the variety of wireless links such as IEEE 802.15.4, low-power IEEE 802.11, or IEEE 802.15.1 (Bluetooth), which give limited radio range but accepts large number of nodes in a cluster via suitable routing protocols’ (Galperti, 2008). Zigbee (IEEE 802.15.4), WiFi (IEEE 802.11), and Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15.1) are suitable wireless communication technology for connecting things in an urban area than using GPRS or GSM transmission.