A Study on a LoRa-Based Streetlight Control System Using Vehicle Detection

The growing demand for energy and the expansion of public infrastructure have led to a continuous increase in electricity consumption in public facilities. Among them, street lighting is one of the major energy-intensive infrastructures due to its wide deployment and long operating hours. Conventional streetlight control methods, based on fixed time or ambient brightness, suffer from inefficiency as they consume unnecessary power even during periods of very low traffic. To address this issue, this study proposes a distributed streetlight control system that selectively activates lights along the vehicle’s travel path by detecting vehicle approach in advance and using LoRa wireless communication. The proposed system utilizes traffic detection data from the National Transport Information Center to analyze traffic variations and implements a packet-based communication structure between nodes with separated detection and control functions. Simulation results demonstrate that in road segments with high nighttime non-traffic ratios, the proposed system can achieve more than 50% power savings. These results highlight that the LoRa-based distributed lighting control approach is particularly effective in low-traffic scenarios and can contribute to the sustainable energy management of public infrastructure.