International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)

Volume 72– No.18, June 2013

Design of Traffic Flow based Street Light Control

System

Vipasha Preeti Abrol

Centre for Development of Centre for Development of
Advanced Computing, Advanced Computing, Mohali,
Mohali, Punjab, India Punjab, India

ABSTRACT detection technology and maintain wireless

Monitoring of street lights and controlling is of utmost communication among lampposts and control terminal
importance in developing country like India to reduce the using ZigBee wireless protocol.
power consumption. This paper presents a street light This proposed system utilizes the latest technology for the
control system which combines various technologies: a sources of light as LED Lamps instead of generally used
timer, Liquid Crystal Display (LCD), a statistics of traffic street lamps such as High Pressure Sodium Lamps, etc.
flow magnitude, a photosensitive detector (LDR), infrared The LED technology is preferred as it offers several
photoelectric control, Light Emitting Diodes (LED), power advantages over other traditional technologies like energy
transistors, dual relays and wireless communication saving due to high current luminous efficiency, low
(ZigBee). This system contains light sensor to observe the maintenance cost, high color rendering index, rapid startup
day and night detection to turn lamps on, merely during speed, long working life etc. This proposed system makes
night time. It also includes infrared detectors to turn light use of infrared photoelectric sensor (G12-3C3PA) for
on automatically when vehicles, pedestrians pass by, later vehicle detection.
turn off after a certain predefined delay for even more
energy conserving. This system also includes fault
detection and feedback circuit to indicate the present state
of the control system. The intact information regarding
these various aspects is transferred to nearby control
terminal (base station) by using ZigBee communication to
visualize the state of the system by creation of Graphical
User Interface (GUI) there. It allows substantial energy
savings with increased performance and maintainability.

Keywords
GUI-Graphical User Interface, ZigBee, Infrared detection,
photosensitive

1. INTRODUCTION Figure 1: G12- 3C3PA

Automation, Power consumption and Cost Effectiveness Specifications of IR Photoelectric sensor Used:
are the important considerations in the present field of  Model no: G12 -3C3PA
electronics and electrical related technologies. Industry of  Detection distance: 3m
street lighting systems are growing rapidly and going to  Operating voltage: DC10-30V
complex with rapid growth of industry and cities. To
 Output method: PNP transistor o/p
control and maintain complex street lighting system more
 Output status : NO (light -on)
economically, various street light control systems are
 Detection method : Through beam
developed. These systems are developed to control and
reduce energy consumption of a town's public lighting  Response time : < 2ms
system using different technologies. These range from Some of the advantages of infrared detectors are that they
controlling a circuit of street lights and/or individual lights can be operated during both day and night, and they can be
with specific ballasts and network operating protocols. mounted in both side and overhead configurations. In this
They may include sending and receiving instructions via developed prototype, they are mounted in side
separate data networks, at high frequency over the top of configurations. The developed system uses (wireless)
the low voltage supply or wireless. Various protocols have ZigBee communication to send information from
been developed as well as compatible hardware for most lampposts through microcontroller to a nearby control
types of lighting. A multi-functional street light control terminal (base station), thus provides the availability of
system, which is more electricity conserving and simplification for the management of the system and offers
convenient, is presented here in this paper. Main goal of ease of maintenance at the operator end.
the proposed work is to control switching of street light
automatically according to light intensity, to develop
traffic flow based dynamic control statistics using infrared

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 72– No.18, June 2013

2. RELATED WORKS The power supply circuit provides the 5V regulated power
Energy savings are of utmost importance today. The goal supply for revitalizing the microcontroller module. The
is therefore, the reduction of operating prices of street core of the system is an AT89S52 microcontroller. It is
lighting with the creation of a system characterized by preferred because of the following features:- it is a low-
straightforward installation and low power consumption. A power, high-performance CMOS 8-bit microcontroller
multi-functional street lights control system based on with 8K Bytes of in-system programmable Flash memory,
AT89S52 was presented. This system included a time cut- 256 bytes of RAM, 32 I/O lines, three 16-bit
out function and an automatic control pattern for electricity timer/counters, a full duplex serial port, on-chip oscillator,
conservation. This design can save a great amount of and supports two software selectable power saving modes:
electricity compared to street lamps that keep alight during low power Idle and Power- down mode. The
nights. Furthermore, this system has auto-alarm function photosensitive detection circuit consists of Day & night
which will set off if any light is damaged and will show sensor to determine the external light intensity. The
the serial number of the damaged light, thus it is easy to be threshold (reference) illumination level is set initially. The
found and repaired the damaged light [2]. In this paper, a photoelectric sensor with set threshold intensity is used to
simpler, multipurpose, cost-effective design to control the observe street conditions as the intensity of daylight and,
on-off mechanism of street lights via Short Message depending on the conditions they activate or off the lamps.
Service (SMS) and GSM module has been developed The street lamps still consume a lot of electricity when
[3].This paper discusses a new intelligent control terminal merely a few vehicles are driving around the road. Thus,
of solar street light. It combines of current General Street there is a great necessity to develop a control system based
light charge and discharge management, controller and on the traffic flow density. Whenever there is no traffic i.e.
wireless communication technology. It employs fuzzy density of traffic is zero, there is no need of street light to
control theory to control the uncertain system to achieve be glow on highways which saves power consumption to a
reasonable battery charge or discharge. The terminal has greater extent. The lights of a particular area should glow
the feature of running on the network and off the network only when a vehicle enters that area on highways. For this
independently, so it ensures the stability of the system [8]. purpose, the infrared detection circuit has been used. It
In order to reach a high performance level in a street consists of IR sensor (presence sensor) which has the task
lighting control system, two important aspects must be of identifying the passage of a vehicle or pedestrian
taken into account: the selection of the adequate causing the switching ON/OFF of street lamps. This
communication protocol, on the one hand, and the feature permits to activate lamps solely when necessary,
selection of the network topology that supports the avoiding wastage of energy. The load which is street-light
architecture, on the other hand. Taking into consideration lamps is connected to microcontroller. Using power
these circumstances, this paper focuses on an assessment transistors and solid state dual relays, the street-lamps are
of the performance of the mesh and tree network switched ON/OFF. The solid state relays accept the
topologies which, along with the ZigBee communication triggering voltage from power transistors which in turn are
protocol, can be implemented in a street lighting control triggered by microcontroller on reception of activation
architecture. As a result of the simulations that have been signals from the sensors. The fault detection circuit
conducted, the data reveals that the tree topology is much indicates the LED lamp failure as well as wire fault along
more efficient than the mesh topology[9].An innovative with lamp and wire number when the lamps are firstly
wireless street lighting system with optimized management turned on, on sensing the night. Through feedback circuit
and efficiency has been presented in this paper. Wireless the malfunctioning message is transmitted to the controller
communication based ZigBee wireless devices which which displays it on the LCD and also transmitted
allow more efficient street lamp system management; wirelessly through ZigBee module to the control terminal.
advanced interface and control architecture are used. The The LCD display is used to show different conditional
Information is transferred point-by-point using ZigBee messages like day, night, light testing, wire fault, LED
transmitters and receivers to a control terminal to diagnose failure, etc. The sensors transfer the collected information
different conditions of street lights. [10]. to a controller that runs the software to manage the system.

3. BLOCK DIAGRAM OF PROPOSED

SYSTEM
The block diagram of proposed street lights control system
is shown in Figure 2 (a) and Figure 2 (b). The transmitter
end consists of power supply, microcontroller AT89S52,
photosensitive detection circuit (Day & night sensor),
infrared vehicle detector, feedback circuit, fault detection
circuit, LCD display and ZigBee transmitter module. The
receiver part consists of ZigBee receiver module,
MAX232, RS232 and PC. The block diagram explains the
simple working of the whole system developed.

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 72– No.18, June 2013

Power
ZigBee TX LCD
supply

Microcontroller
AT89S52
Power output for
lamps
Day & night
sensor

Feedback circuit

Decoder circuit
(LM 234)
LDR LDR LDR

Lamp 1 Lamp 2 Lamp 3

IR IR IR
sensor1 sensor2 sensor3

Figure 2 (a): Transmitter end diagram

PC

ZigBee (Control terminal)

RS232
RX. MAX 232

Figure 2 (b): Receiver end diagram

microcontroller receives data of the state of the lamps and

sends it to a ZigBee receiver module which is connected
with control terminal processing unit (base station). The
operating voltage required for ZigBee module is 3.3V. It is
All the operation is regulated by a timing management that achieved by using low dropout voltage regulator LM2950
permits the system is set for predestined time. The ZigBee which uses 5V as input from regulated power supply
transmission module (Series S2) connected to section and provides 3.3V output to energize the ZigBee

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 72– No.18, June 2013

module. The processing unit consists of a terminal with a Figure 4 and control flow in Figure 5. When the signal is
serial UART (RS232) interface that receives data detected at the point S, the state of lamp A switched (On to
regarding the state of the lamps provided by a ZigBee Off or Off to On), when the signal gets detected at the
receiver module, connected to the UART interface. The point B, the states of lamp A and lamp C are switched on
terminal is needed for graphical presentation of the system or off simultaneously, while point D detects the signal,
results. The graphical interface permits to visualize the lamp C and lamp E are switched on or off simultaneously,
state of the system with the state of the lights and the while S’ detects the signal, lamp E is switched on or off.
power consumption of every lamp (Power Consumption
Data graph). The basic block diagram plays an important
role in building the project completely and to provide a
basic understanding of the working of the system. All
blocks in the diagram are implemented in the circuit level.
The minimal circuit of system is as shown in the Figure 3.

Figure 4: Streetlights schematic

Start

Point S
detects the Y
signal
NN
Lamp A switches on or
off

Point B detects
the signal Y
N
Lamp A and C switch on
or off simultaneously

Point D detects
the signal Y
N
Lamp C and E switch on
or off simultaneously

Point S’
Y
detects the
signal N
Lamp E switches on or
off

End
Figure 3: The minimal circuit diagram

4. STREET LIGHT AUTOMATIC

CONTROL METHODOLOGY Figure 5: The control flow chart
The street light control system adopts a dynamic control
methodology. According to this, the initial state of the
lights is set as off. Street light schematic is shown in

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 72– No.18, June 2013

5. ZIGBEE COMMUNICATION
The ZigBee is a specification for a suite of high level 5. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
communication protocols using small, low-power digital The GUI at the control terminal (base station) for the
radios based on an IEEE 802.15.4 standard for wireless
presentation of the state of the system is constructed using
personal area networks. ZigBee is targeted at applications that
require a low data rate, long battery life, and secure MATLAB as shown in the Figure 6.
networking. ZigBee has a defined rate of 250 Kbit/s, best
suited for periodic or intermittent data or a single signal
transmission from a sensor or input device. ZigBee
specification is intended to be simpler and less expensive than
other WPANs, such as Bluetooth in terms of price and
consumption of energy. The bit rate of transmission depends
on frequency band.

Table 1: Comparison of ZigBee with other wireless

technologies

Figure 6: Exemplary GUI of street light control system

The results of different failure conditions i.e. of wire fault and

lamp malfunction are presented in Figure 7 and Figure 8.

On 2.4 GHz band the typical bit rate is of 250 kb/s, 40 kb/s at
915MHz and 20 kb/s at 868 MHz The standard distance of
ZigBee transmission vary, depending on the atmospheric
conditions and therefore the transmission power, ranges from
tens to hundred meters since the transmission power is
deliberately kept as low as necessary (in the order of few
mW) to keep up very low energy consumption. In proposed
system, the ZigBee transmitter module is used to transfer data
from microcontroller to ZigBee receiver module interfaced to
control terminal (PC). ZigBee wireless communication
network has been implemented with the utilization of Series
S2 radio frequency modules with 100 m outdoor range. They
operate within the ISM band at the frequency of 2.4 GHz. The
receiver sensitivity is high. The modules ought to be provided
by 3.3V DC supply, and then the power consumption is within
the order of 50 mA. The module supports sleep mode where
consumption is smaller than 10μA. ZigBee is configured by
the use of X-CTU software.
Figure 7: Fault condition due to lamp failure

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 72– No.18, June 2013

8. REFERENCES
[1] Ali, M.; Orabi, M.; Abdelkarim, E.; Qahouq, J.A.A.;
Aroudi, A.E., "Design and development of energy-free
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7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Conference on, vol., no., pp.958, 961, 18-25 May 2012.
We would like to express a special thanks to C-DAC Mohali
for providing us means to carry out our research work in
pernickety way. We are also grateful to MHRD, Govt. of
India for providing us a platform to do our research work.

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