Two German companies, Infineon Technologies AG and Eluminocity GmbH, have jointly developed an intelligent streetlight system to save energy, enable a connected infrastructure, and tackle the requirements of a smart city of the future.
Each of the companies contributes specific knowledge to the connected city partnership. Infineon provides decades of expertise in the field of sensors, power management chips, and security systems. Eluminocity adds its experience in system integration, data analysis and application solutions. Other partners deliver connectivity, computing performance, and cloud solutions. The intelligent streetlight can be protected against unauthorized access from the cloud down to the device level, and can be enabled for updating its hardware and software. The intelligent streetlight saves energy through the use of long-lasting and easily controlled LEDs. Around 19% of the world’s electricity is currently consumed by lighting, of which about 80% is used in professional applications, such as street lighting. Replacing streetlights with LEDs could save more than half of that electricity.
The intelligent streetlight can be configured to be able to provide a variety of applications, including:
The streetlight can be fitted with an integrated charging station for electric vehicles (EVs), which ensures that a charging infrastructure can be easily built in residential areas. The result would be to boost electromobility, given that drivers would be more enthusiastic about EVs if there were more charging stations;
The streetlight could be equipped with parking spot detection sensors that would feed information about the availability of vacant spaces to the cloud, creating the basis for an intelligent traffic management system;
Due to integrated radar sensors, the intelligent streetlight can also be configured to adapt to environmental conditions, so that brightness can be increased if the weather is bad or when cars or pedestrians are approaching them;
The streetlight also provides an option to be equipped with additional sensors that analyze the environment. Gas sensors can be integrated to measure air quality and report when defined limits are exceeded via a cloud connection to a municipal control center;
The addition of microphones supports detection of certain audio patterns, enabling the automatic reporting of incidents, such as car accidents, to the nearest police station;
Equipped with high-frequency components, the streetlight may also serve as a base station for communications based on the 5G mobile radio standard, which, when compared with the previous standard, offers a hundred times higher transmission speed, a thousand times higher data capacity, real-time capability, and a lower energy consumption.
“Together with our partners, we can offer a secured platform with scalable sensor hub, data processing and connectivity,” said Andreas Urschitz, president of power management at Infineon. “Our solution leverages existing cellular infrastructure and can support the evolution towards 5G deployment.”
“The behavior and needs of city dwellers will rapidly advance due to digitization. For this reason, our hard- and software updates make the streetlight future-proof,” added Sebastian Jagsch, CEO and founder of Eluminocity. “The intelligent streetlight can accommodate new sensors, as well as new components for mobile communications.”
