Internet of Things (IoT) is proliferating rapidly and on the frontline of that modern future is the smart lighting system. It takes more than a smart bulb or a smart approach for a home to be a smart home. From regulating a smart bulb to an extensive network luminaire in buildings or cities, intelligent lighting systems are comprised of comprehensive elements. Smart lighting has the potential to become an enabling infrastructure for IoT, with capacities that exceed just lighting and energy-saving features.
Digitization has altered the dynamics of the interactions between organizations and the physical world. The augmenting adoption of IoT is anticipated to make the smart lighting industry the next big disruptor of the digital world. The integration of IoT in smart lighting systems has given rise to a technology that is adopting energy-efficient lights and sensors over conventional lighting solutions such as CFLs, halogens, and incandescent bulbs. Smart lighting has garnered attention globally, and it aims to combine drivers with control algorithms, sensing, and wireless mode of communication to develop efficient autonomous lighting solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem.
Smart Light IoT confers several benefits: reduced maintenance costs, top-of-the-line customer service, energy, and cost conservation, augmented public safety, and others. Smart lighting is a technology-driven concept that connects three essential attributes of solid-state lighting infrastructure, improved control, and universal communication interfaces. Modern lighting systems include light-emitting diode technology and advanced drivers. These systems are now evolved to support the communication interfaces of the Internet of Things (IoT) environment. The Smart light IoT systems provide advanced features, such as remote controlling the light source and inclusion of numerous communication interfaces. The growth of connected IoT lighting control systems is on an accelerated path, applicable from smart infrastructure to industrial lighting systems.
Smart lighting is a major Internet of Things (IoT) tech product, and it has massive potential and a short payback period. One of the survey reports suggests that a completely deployed smart-street lighting project has the potential to save nearly 80% of the energy that a traditional system would consume. But while energy efficiency is an enormous advantage of smart lighting, what is more, important is the lighting’s efficiency to function as an enabling infrastructure for outdoor and indoor IoT solutions.
Smart Lights Illuminating the Smart Cities
The possibilities of deploying smart light IoT solutions in smart cities is endless. IoT capabilities integrated into the connected light poles can offer the motorists automated updates on the availability of parking space, potentially altering the experiences for urban driving. Sensors also have the capability to detect which streets require cleaning and sweeping, thereby saving time for sanitation workers by preventing them from making rounds in their heavy vehicles.
Smart sensors gather vital data from the city limits; however, concerns regarding the perfect sensors to be integrated into connected street lighting systems still exist. Most of these concerns are regarding the optimum height of the wind & rain and temperature & humidity sensors. And because the smart lighting market is evolving significantly, the ideal sensor combinations become clearer as smart cities are adjusting to these experiences.
Smart Light IoT Components
Advanced lighting systems cover enhanced features that surpass traditional illumination reasons, and these abilities encompass optical communications, remote controllable features, and augmented control features that create a new paradigm of remotely controlling the system from the internet and copy any light in real-time.
Solid-State Lighting Fixtures: SSL is typically an efficient solution for smart buildings and industrial applications. The luminous efficiency of LEDs is soaring as the development continues while simultaneously becoming more cost-efficient. Solid-State lighting has advanced to a point where LED is now the preferred light source in various applications due to its benefits such as long shelf life, energy savings, and enhanced light output quality.
Luminaire: Luminaires are essentially connected with autonomous sensing abilities, enhanced IoT connectivity, interoperability, and scalability features in numerous applications. Luminaries can be designed with intelligence and automation integrated with numerous connected sensors that can detect ambient motions, CO2 levels, humidity and temperature, and fire, to name a few. Luminaires are wirelessly connected to a gateway through Poe, Wi-Fi, and PLC, among others, or with wires to lay down the infrastructure to communicate and monitor the luminaire.
Smart Light IoT: Market Trends
The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has bolstered the smart lighting market to exponential growth. The smart light IoT market has been witnessing rapid development propelled by technological advancements, innovative product portfolio, and the rising popularity of the smart lighting concepts. Smart lighting solutions have also become an excellent start point for smart cities. By the next decade, the consumption of power by lighting will account for 40% of the cumulative energy consumption of cities, and as a vital part of smart cities, smart lighting and the Internet of Things (IoT) have a plethora of benefits. The accelerating initiatives by governments to encourage the construction of smart cities equipped with intelligent lighting solutions is also anticipated to drive the market growth.
Smart lighting behemoths like Philips have paved the way for the smart lighting market. In 2015, Philips Lighting launched Philips CityTouch as a smart connected lighting management platform. In 2017, it was introduced in China and was amalgamated with China Telecom’s Tianyi cloud service and next-gen NB-IoT tech. Now it is applied for accessing several smart city applications, such as emergency systems, security monitoring systems, traffic management systems, among others and plays an integral part in the smart city development in China.
In 2018, Wipro Lighting, a leading lighting company in India, signed a partnership agreement with Schréder with the former marketing smart city products and beyond basic lighting solutions besides Wipro’s portfolio. Beyond Lighting Solutions deploy IoT-based cases and applications in smart cities and smart campuses. The partnership aims to combine the patented tech of Schréder to empower smart cities in India and address the lighting requirements in urban areas.
In December 2020, Delta, a global leader in power solutions, announced that the company’s Bluetooth Panel light PA1 received UL IoT security Rating, making it the first smart lighting product across the world to do so. The panel can be controlled via smartphones, decreasing expenditure, and offering an information backbone for smart buildings. The security certification is anticipated to help Delta gain a strong foothold in the global market.
Future of Smart Lighting Solutions
Smart lighting garnered a lot of attention in the last decade due to the escalating deployment of advanced LED drivers, sensors, and connected LED Platforms. To capitalize on the trend, companies are constantly vying to develop innovative products to deploy smart LED luminaires into the infrastructure of IoT. Lighting solutions and IoT come together for a plethora of applications in various sectors, such as health and wellness, optical communications, location services, and sense.
As the world is moving forward, manufacturers and IT developers need to develop products for smart lighting approach that can expand with time and as the digital ecosystems progress. The success of the industry depends on the collaborations between major players and their product portfolio with a combination of IoT infrastructure and advanced lighting control systems.