Assessment of Communication Technologies Supporting Smart Streetlighting Applications

With increasing availability of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and smart devices, many smart city applications have emerged. Smart streetlighting is one of most important building blocks in a smart city. As streetlights are widely distributed across a city and some are already networked, they have a great potential to serve as a readily available infrastructure supporting additional sensing and control devices, such as environmental sensors, traffic sensors and/or IP cameras, to provide city-wide services. To connect different sensors and actuators, communication technologies and networks are of prime importance. A variety of communication technologies are available, such as Cellular, WiMAX, LTE, SigFox, LoRa and Weightless. The objective of this paper is to review various communication technologies available for supporting different applications implemented on networked streetlights. Evaluation criteria are based on specific network requirements of different smart streetlighting applications with respect to their data rate, latency, reliability and security.