Abstract—Over 300 million streetlights in cities and campuses throughout the world are powered using electricity generated by burning fossil fuels. Traditional streetlights have mechanical timers to turn the lights ON-OFF for a preset amount of time. Since they are manually operated, they are turned on at full intensity for a fixed period of time regardless of the amount of ambient light, leading to energy wastage. Another disadvantage of these networks is that there is no way of detecting a light when it stops functioning and it takes a lot of time to identify, service and replace it. This paper discusses an off-grid solar powered lighting system for smart cities that is economic, and efficient. The designed system powers DC LED lights. LEDs are used since their power consumption is much less compared to the enormous power consumption of traditional HID lights. The system is integrated with the IoT enabling it to take intelligent decisions without any human involvement. Further, the use of IoT enables remote control and monitoring of the system using Android and iOS applications. The system utilizes sensors to obtain data on the amount of power generated by the solar panels and the amount of power consumed by the LEDs. This data can be monitored using the mobile applications and it is also backed up in a database on the Google Cloud. This data can be analyzed to obtain insights on power generation and power consumption trends. The proposed system is implemented economically, and the performance analysis results are promising compared to traditional lighting systems.

Index Terms—Smart lighting system, smart cities, solar power, Wi-Fi, Android and iOS applications.

Sairoop Dasaraju and Hamid Shahnasser are with College of Science and Engineering, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, USA.

Cite:Sairoop Dasaraju, Hamid Shahnasser, "Smart Solar-Powered Lighting System for Smart Cities," International Journal of Computer and Electrical Engineering vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 83-92, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).