Internet of Things (IoT) has ushered in a new era of unique technological opportunities, changing the way we collect and harness information from common devices we use in everyday living. The total number of IoT connected devices installed worldwide is projected to reach 75.44 billion by 2025 and will dramatically impact our lives, bringing about greater convenience and comfort, as well as valuable insights from data analytics to help protect the environment.

City planners are striving to transform urban spaces into smart cities, where every device deployed are connected effortlessly, managed intelligently, and optimised effectively to serve the public. To reduce the strain on the environment, many progressive countries and cities are also on the lookout for environmentally friendly solutions that will reduce the consumption of natural resources and emissions of greenhouse gases, to counter climate change. Two critical examples of drastic climate changes: fire in Amazon rainforest and melting ice in North Pole.

The answer to this is lighting — Lighting is ubiquitous, lights are everywhere people are. Any solution that significantly reduces the energy consumed by lighting systems will have far reaching environmentally friendly impacts, beyond cost savings.

Today, organisations can actively empower sustainability by adopting the IoT technology into their building lighting systems.

By embedding smart sensing and wireless networking technology into the ubiquitous lights, the IoT-enabled lighting system can be programmed with advanced lighting control to adjust the luminance level according to activity. Lights in the area will dim down during lull periods to reduce consumption. When motion is detected by any smart sensor, the lights in the affected zone will respond to brighten up the paths ahead, creating an on-demand, predictive lighting system.

With livability and optimisation in mind, we designed and developed AgilLiteS, an IoT-enabled Smart Lighting Solution, for sustainable cities. It transforms the humble incandescent light bulb into a smart IoT sensory network that delivers a slew of environmentally friendly benefits, while providing city planners and building owners with wealth of data to improve township design, facility management and monetisation opportunities for building owners.
Transforming ordinary lights into an intelligent sensory network

AgilLiteS delivers smart lighting without the need for any additional broadband network infrastructure. This means no Cat-6 cabling, routers and Wi-Fi access equipment in the congested 2.4/5GHz spectrum. It is infrastructure-free, with all devices connected directly to each other via license-free channels in the 900 MHz band to form a mesh network. AgilLiteS uses a deterministic communication protocol that eliminates the risk of message loss, as opposed to collision detection based protocols that may encounter major performance issues caused by message packet collisions. Large-scale estate lighting installations, and scalability for future network expansion becomes fuss-free.

A large deployment of AgilLiteS will comprise multiple on-site smart controllers, with each controller connecting up to 400 dimmable LED luminaires with embedded smart motion sensors. The sensor nodes are able to communicate wirelessly with neighbouring nodes simultaneously to form a multi-hop mesh network. The carefully designed sensor antenna and digital signal processing worked together to overcome communication blind spots and maximise the bandwidth efficiency against the complex radio propagation environment that exist within buildings.

The sensors are equipped with weatherproof housing that suit both indoor and outdoor applications. For outdoor installations, ambient photocell sensors are added for daylight harvesting to maximise energy saving, to determine whether the luminaires should be switched on or not.

Sensing, Predicting and Optimising through Data Analytics

Predictive maintenance of the lighting system is now a reality. Data collected from the smart sensors allow the system to identify luminaires that are on the verge of failing. This enables the facility manager to schedule preventive maintenance task for the lighting system, to replace luminaires before they fail, greatly improving the productivity of the maintenance team. This represents a revolutionary change from the traditional ways of reacting to luminaire failures, greatly reducing cost and improving the quality of service to building occupants.

Rethink, how your office and factory premises lighting can be intelligently empowered to provide:

  • Predictive on-demand lighting for safety, where the path ahead is lighted up in advance
  • Proprietary soft dimming with no abrupt brightness change, delivering superior user experience
  • Tamper-proof, light default to full brightness on detection of tampering with automatic alert
  • Integration to CCTV surveillance system for motion triggered recording and alert to security personnel
  • Collection and transport of temperature and other sensor data of interest. The temperature data can be leveraged for air conditioning optimisation, bringing even greater energy savings
  • Activity data collection and data analytics to derive actionable insights such as retail shopper traffic, space utilisation and maintenance scheduling

AgilLiteS delivers significant energy savings of more than 50% beyond LED, and reduce waste through prolonging the lifespan of the luminaires. It reduces carbon footprint while enhancing the safety of city dwellers. It collects IoT sensor data on the environment to aid urban city planners create ever more sustainable and eco-friendly living environment, a natural toolkit for any Smart City.