Distributed Communication for Streetlight Systems : A decentralized solution

Sammanfattning: Streetlights are usually lit during all dark hours even though vehicles or other objects are not using the road. Instead of wasting energy on keeping the streetlights lit when no vehicles are using the road, the streetlights should be lit whenever vehicles are in proximity of the streetlights and turned off otherwise. A distributed network can be used to handle the communication between streetlights for sharing information about vehicles in proximity. There are streetlight systems that adapt from the environment and handles communication but are still not optimized for country roads with low frequency of vehicles. Therefore, distributed communication for streetlight systems is implemented, by letting the streetlights be a part of a distributed system. Each streetlight is represented with a Zolertia RE-Mote, a sensor for detecting objects and an LED. The representation of the streetlights are wirelessly connected as a mesh network where they can communicate with each other and forward data packets to nodes more far away in the network. The concept of having the streetlights in a distributed system is believed to work and can be considered to be applied on streetlights at country roads to save energy.