4 Smart cities and communities
4.5 Intelligent lighting

Connecting street lights together in a computer-controlled network opens the door to a wide range of innovative capabilities that save energy and improve the performance of the lighting system. Beyond those applications there is an option to deploy the non-lighting solutions on the lighting network, making it a ubiquitous platform for smart city applications. The lighting functions include:

- Basic functions - remote on-off control, dimming, and scheduling functions.
- Energy monitoring - accurate information on energy consumption can be used for optimization and grid management.
- Colour control - lighting may be adjusted for public safety purposes, or to fit e.g. special events, etc.
- Adaptive lighting - Motion detectors can enable lighting levels to match street activity (e.g. brightness can be reduced if no traffic is present). Weather sensors can also enable adaption to rain, snow, or other conditions (e.g. lights may be turned on during rain showers and back down when the weather clears).
- Emergency response - there is a number of features for dealing with public safety issues and emergencies, such as flashing lights in front of a house that emergency workers are attempting to find, brightening lights at an accident or crime scene, use of adaptive light controls to provide warnings to drivers in school safety zones, etc.

Besides the capabilities for advanced lighting controls, street lighting has potential to wide range of Smart city applications as:

- Environmental/air quality monitoring - air quality and noise sensors can be easily deployed on street lighting poles.
- Traffic monitoring - mounting of traffic sensors can provide a more accurate and flexible monitoring of traffic.
- Smart parking - mounting of parking sensors or video cameras with vehicle detection software can provide occupancy information.

Besides this, the lights can provide the network connectivity service itself e.g. using WLAN.

Interesting use case in emergency area is e.g. mounting of „panic“ button on the pole [29]. In case of any emergency or danger, the person can press this button which raises an alarm at the nearby police station. A camera can be placed on top of the street light to track these cases as well. There exist concepts [30] that use „panic“ button in mobile applications, causing the street light starts to blink, attracting the attention of people around, which could also help.