Street lighting in smart cities: A simulation tool for the design of systems based on narrowband PLC

Excessive or improper street lighting is currently responsible for a significant waste of electrical energy in many cities worldwide. In order to improve energy efficiency, the traditional light posts are expected to be gradually replaced by smart systems able to adapt the features of the emitted light to different environmental, traffic, or crowdedness conditions. Power Line Communication (PLC) is the natural choice to support smart light control, since no additional communication infrastructure is needed. However, at the moment not so many simulation tools exist to guide the design and the deployment of smart lighting systems based on PLC. In this paper, we partially address this issue by presenting suitable circuit models that can be used to analyze (through simulations at the physical layer) the behavior of narrowband PLC (NB-PLC) signals transmitted over low-voltage (LV) lines for street light control. The proposed approach is quite simple from the computational point of view, and it is scalable enough to evaluate the quality of PLC signals in large networks with different topologies. The results of several simulations, with signals in the frequency range 95-148.5 kHz, have been compared with the outcomes of some laboratory experiments over a test line.