Interconnected smart cities bring beautiful dreams. In such cities, digital technologies weave together multiple unique civic functions to improve operational efficiency and intelligence. It is estimated that by 2050, 70% of the world’s population will live in smart cities, where life will be healthy, happy and safe. Crucially, it promises to be green, humanity’s last trump card against the destruction of the planet.
But smart cities are hard work. New technologies are expensive, local governments are constrained, and politics shifts to short election cycles, making it difficult to achieve a highly operational and financial efficient centralized technology deployment model that is reused in urban areas globally or nationally. In fact, most of the leading smart cities in the headlines are really just a collection of different technology experiments and regional side projects, with little to look forward to expanding.
Let’s look at dumpsters and parking lots, which are smart with sensors and analytics; In this context, return on investment (ROI) is difficult to calculate and standardize, especially when government agencies are so fragmented (between public agencies and private services, as well as between towns, cities, regions and countries). Look at air quality monitoring; How is it easy to calculate the impact of clean air on health services in a city? Logically, smart cities are hard to implement, but also hard to deny.
There is, however, a glimmer of light in the fog of digital change. Street lighting in all municipal services provides a platform for cities to acquire smart functions and combine multiple applications for the first time. Look at the various smart street lighting projects being implemented in San Diego in the US and Copenhagen in Denmark, and they are increasing in number. These projects combine arrays of sensors with modular hardware units fixed to light poles to allow remote control of the lighting itself and to run other functions, such as traffic counters, air quality monitors, and even gun detectors.
From the height of the light pole, cities have begun to address the “liveability” of the city on the street, including traffic flow and mobility, noise and air pollution, and emerging business opportunities. Even parking sensors, traditionally buried in parking lots, can be cheaply and efficiently connected to the lighting infrastructure. Whole cities can suddenly be networked and optimized without digging up streets or renting space or solving abstract computing problems about healthier living and safer streets.
This works because, for the most part, smart lighting solutions are not initially calculated with a bet on savings from smart solutions. Instead, the viability of the urban digital revolution is an accidental consequence of the simultaneous development of lighting.
The energy savings from replacing incandescent bulbs with solid-state LED lighting, along with readily available power supplies and extensive lighting infrastructure, make smart cities feasible.
The pace of LED conversion is already flat, and smart lighting is booming. About 90% of the world’s 363 million street lights will be illuminated by leds by 2027, according to Northeast Group, a smart infrastructure analyst. A third of them will also run smart applications, a trend that started a few years ago. Until substantial funding and blueprints are published, street lighting is best suited as a network infrastructure for various digital technologies in large-scale smart cities.
Save LED cost
According to the rules of thumb proposed by lighting and sensor manufacturers, smart lighting can reduce infrastructure related administrative and maintenance costs by 50 to 70 percent. But most of those savings (about 50 percent, enough to make a difference) could be realized simply by switching to energy-efficient LED bulbs. The rest of the savings come from connecting and controlling illuminators and passing intelligent information about how they work across the lighting network.
Centralized adjustments and observations alone can significantly reduce maintenance costs. There are many ways, and they complement each other: scheduling, seasonal control and timing adjustment; Fault diagnosis and reduced maintenance truck attendance. The impact increases with the size of the lighting network and flows back into the initial ROI case. The market says this approach can pay for itself in about five years, and has the potential to pay for itself in less time by incorporating “softer” smart city concepts, such as those with parking sensors, traffic monitors, air quality control and gun detectors.
Guidehouse Insights, a market analyst, tracks more than 200 cities to gauge the pace of change; It says a quarter of cities are rolling out smart lighting schemes. Sales of smart systems are soaring. ABI Research calculates that global revenues will jump tenfold to $1.7 billion by 2026. Earth’s “light bulb moment” is like this; Street lighting infrastructure, which is closely related to human activities, is the way forward as a platform for smart cities in a broader context. As early as 2022, more than two-thirds of new street lighting installations will be tied to a central management platform to integrate data from multiple smart city sensors, ABI said.
Adarsh Krishnan, principal analyst at ABI Research, said: “There are many more business opportunities for smart city vendors that leverage urban light-pole infrastructure by deploying wireless connectivity, environmental sensors and even smart cameras. The challenge is to find viable business models that encourage society to deploy multi-sensor solutions at scale in a cost-effective manner.”
The question is no longer whether to connect, but how, and how much to connect in the first place. As Krishnan observes, part of this is about business models, but money is already flowing into smart cities through cooperative utility privatization (PPP), where private companies take on financial risk in return for success in venture capital. Subscription-based “as-a-service” contracts spread investment over payback periods, which also spurred activity.
In contrast, Streetlights in Europe are being connected to traditional honeycomb networks (typically 2G up to LTE (4G)) as well as the new HONEYCOMB Iot standard device, LTE-M. Proprietary ultra-narrowband (UNB) technology is also coming into play, along with Zigbee, a small spread of Low-power Bluetooth, and IEEE 802.15.4 derivatives.
The Bluetooth Technology Alliance (SIG) places special emphasis on smart cities. The group predicts that shipments of low-power Bluetooth in smart cities will grow fivefold over the next five years, to 230 million a year. Most are linked to asset tracking in public places, such as airports, stadiums, hospitals, shopping malls and museums. However, low-power Bluetooth is also aimed at outdoor networks. “The asset management solution improves the utilization of smart city resources and helps reduce urban operating costs,” the Bluetooth Technology Alliance said.
A Combination of the Two Techniques is Better!
Each technology has its controversies, however, some of which have been resolved in debate. For example, UNB proposes stricter limits on payload and delivery schedules, ruling out parallel support for multiple sensor applications or for applications such as cameras that require it. Short-range technology is cheaper and provides greater throughput for developing lighting as-a-platform Settings. Importantly, they can also play a backup role in the event of WAN signal disconnection, and provide a means for technicians to read sensors directly for debugging and diagnostics. Low-power Bluetooth, for example, works with almost every smartphone on the market.
Although a denser grid can enhance robustness, its architecture becomes complex and puts higher energy demands on interconnected point-to-point sensors. Transmission range is also problematic; Coverage using Zigbee and Low-power Bluetooth is only a few hundred meters at most. Although a variety of short-range technologies are competitive and well suited for grid-based, neighbor-wide sensors, they are closed networks that ultimately require the use of gateways to transmit signals back to the cloud.
A honeycomb connection is usually added at the end. The trend for smart lighting vendors is to use point-to-cloud honeycomb connectivity to provide 5 to 15 km distance gateway or sensor device coverage. Beehive technology brings large transmission range and simplicity; It also provides off-the-shelf networking and a higher level of security, according to the Hive community.
Neill Young, head of the Internet of Things Vertical at the GSMA, an industry body representing mobile network operators, said: “Action operators… has all the coverage of the entire area, therefore requires no additional infrastructure to connect the urban lighting devices and sensors. In the licensed spectrum honeycomb network has safety and reliability, means that the operator has the best conditions, can support a large number of needs a much longer battery life and minimal maintenance and long transmission distance of low-cost equipment.”
Of all the connectivity technologies available, HONEYCOMB will see the greatest growth in the coming years, according to ABI. The buzz about 5G networks and the scramble to host 5G infrastructure has prompted operators to grab the light pole and fill small honeycomb units in urban environments. In the United States, Las Vegas and Sacramento are deploying LTE and 5G, as well as smart city sensors, on street lights through carriers AT&T and Verizon. Hong Kong has just unveiled a plan to install 400 5G-enabled lampposts as part of its smart city initiative.
Tight Integration of Hardware
Nielsen added: “Nordic offers multi-mode short-range and long-range products, with its nRF52840 SoC supporting low power Bluetooth, Bluetooth Mesh and Zigbee, as well as Thread and proprietary 2.4ghz systems. Nordic’s Honeycomb based nRF9160 SiP offers both LTE-M and NB-iot support. The combination of the two technologies brings performance and cost advantages.”
Frequency separation allows these systems to coexist, with the former running in the permission-free 2.4ghz band and the latter running wherever LTE is located. At lower and higher frequencies, there is a trade-off between wider area coverage and greater transmission capacity. But in lighting platforms, short-range wireless technology is typically used to interconnect sensors, edge computing power is used for observation and analysis, and honeycomb iot is used to send data back to the cloud, as well as sensor control for higher maintenance levels.
So far, the pair of short-range and long-range radios have been added separately, not built into the same silicon chip. In some cases, the components are separated because the failures of the illuminator, sensor and radio are all different. However, integrating dual radios into a single system will result in closer technology integration and lower acquisition costs, which are key considerations for smart cities.
Nordic thinks the market is moving in that direction. The company has integrated short-range wireless and honeycomb IoT connectivity technologies into hardware and software at the developer level so that solution manufacturers can run the pair simultaneously in test applications. Nordic’s board DK for nRF9160 SiP was designed for developers to “make their Honeycomb iot applications work”; Nordic Thingy:91 has been described as a “full-fledged off-the-shelf gateway” that can be used as an off-the-shelf prototyping platform or proof-of-concept for early product designs.
Both feature multi-mode honeycomb nRF9160 SiP and multi-protocol short-range nRF52840 SoC. Embedded systems that combine the two technologies for commercial IoT deployments are only “months” away from commercialization, according to Nordic.
Nordic Nielsen said: “smart city lighting platform has been set up all these connection technology; the market is very clearly how to combine them together, we have provided solutions for manufacturers development board, to test how they work together. They are combined into business solutions is imperative, in just a matter of time.”
Post time: Mar-29-2022