Lighting Up Smart Cities with Lightweight Machine-to-Machine (LwM2M)
A little over a century ago, we had lamplighters. Today our street lighting uses electrical grids and timers. Tomorrow, thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT), public lighting will likely be more akin to Lighting-as-a Service (LaaS). LaaS leveraging networks, sensors, and predictive analytics to provide cars and pedestrians with lighting on a personalized, as-needed basis, with the maintenance done much faster at a reduced cost.
According to a new report from ABI Research, “the annual revenue from smart street lighting will grow by 31% between 2018 and 2026 to reach $1.7 billion in annual revenue by 2026”. Migrating street lighting under the umbrella of digital control opens up a new horizon of automation and predictive monitoring.
Smart Street Lighting: The Low-Hanging Fruit of Smart City Initiatives
Thanks to embedded sensors and digital networks, street lighting is becoming the bedrock of smart city initiatives. They now have the power to collect and transmit information that helps cities to monitor, maintain and adjust its infrastructure to their constituents in real-time.
Managing more than 3 million streetlights worldwide, Itron has been recognized as a leader by the Navigant Research Leaderboard on Smart Street Lighting. Not only does the smart city platform vendor provide end-to-end streetlight solutions, but it also collaborates with cities and utilities to offer solutions from intelligent transportation and parking management to public safety and air quality.
To address these challenges, Travis Shanahan, IoT architect with Itron Idea Labs, believes, “standards like LightweightM2M (LwM2M) can allow us to quickly bring mature IoT offerings to market and enable feature-rich, multi-service, multi-vendor ecosystems.”
Future-Proofing Street Lighting Solutions
Members of the Open Mobile Alliance SpecWorks, Itron, and IoTerop both agree standards are necessary to support open, sustainable, smart-city programs.
“By adopting consistent standards, such as LwM2M, smart city solution providers ensure product compatibility, shorten time-to-market, reduce management overhead, improve security by using encryption and authentication features, while perhaps most importantly future-proof solutions so that technology’s needs never slow innovation”, says Hatem Oueslati, CEO and co-founder of IoTerop.
In addition to providing better street lighting solutions, smart street lighting providers using technology like IoTerop’s IOWA, based on the LwM2M open standard, can ensure cities will use assets on an as-needed basis, never being limited by a lack of technological foresight.
Want to learn how IoTerop’s IOWA can help support your IoT projects? Contact IoTerop.
