Low-rate wireless personal area networks applied to street lighting

This paper focuses on the development of an energy-efficient street lighting remote management system making use of low-rate wireless personal area networks and the digital addressable lighting interface (DALI) protocol to get the bidirectional communication necessary for checking lamp parameters like lamp status, current level, etc. Because of the fact that two-thirds of the installed street lighting systems use old and inefficient technologies, there exists a huge potential to renew street lighting and save energy consumption. The proposed system uses the DALI protocol in street lighting, increasing the maximum number of ballasts that can be controlled with DALI – originally it can only drive up to 64 ballasts. Some aspects of the wireless communication system and experimental measurements are presented and discussed.