IoT Based Street Light Control System

Abstract

Conventional street lighting stays on for a fixed schedule regardless of ambient light or road usage, which wastes a significant amount of electrical energy. This paper presents the design and implementation of an IoT-based street light monitoring and control system aimed at reducing power consumption, monitoring energy usage, detecting faulty lights, and dimming lights according to actual need. The proposed system uses a Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) to sense ambient light and automatically switch the street light between ON and OFF/dim states, and Infrared (IR) sensors to detect the presence of a vehicle or pedestrian on the road. When no vehicle is present at night, the lights are held at a low-intensity glow; when the IR sensor detects motion, the corresponding light is switched to full brightness through pulse-width modulation (PWM). An ESP32/ESP8266-based microcontroller (interfaced as an Arduino Nano/NodeMCU board in the prototype) reads the sensor data and pushes the real-time ON/OFF status to the Blynk IoT cloud platform, so that the lighting status can be monitored remotely from anywhere through the internet. A relay-driven switching stage provides high reliability, and the modular design keeps the system adaptable to different street layouts and hardware. The prototype was tested on a scaled model road with three lighting nodes and three IR sensors and demonstrated the expected behaviour: lights dim in the absence of traffic and brighten instantly when a vehicle approaches, while status is logged to the cloud in real time.