Silver Spring Networks, a networking leader for the Internet of Things (IoT), announced that it is developing a networked LED street lighting solution that will interoperate with the Philips Advance Xitanium SR driver for outdoor lighting, developed by Philips Lighting, a Royal Philips company and global leader in lighting. The solution is expected to slash cost and complexity, simplify connected lighting, give customers expanded choice, and accelerate the path to smart cities for municipalities, utilities, transportation departments, and other street light network operators.

The new solution builds on the industry-leading Philips Advance Xitanium SR LED driver, which includes new capabilities to enable wireless systems for outdoor connected lighting, and Silver Spring’s IPv6-based Gen5 networking platform for large-scale wireless sensor networks. The solution includes an outdoor lighting control (OLC) from additional Silver Spring ecosystem partners based on the NEMA 7-pin socket for integration by OEMs into light fixtures. This will enable street light operators to leverage the industry’s latest Internet of Things technology and establish a platform for future smart city applications and services.

“As billions of devices become smaller and smarter, analytics and other applications move to the edge, and large-scale networks become cost-effective to deploy and manage, it is becoming increasingly apparent that intelligent outdoor lighting is a catalyst for broader IoT networks,” said Brandon Davito, Vice President of Smart Cities and Lighting, Silver Spring Networks. “With as much as 40% of a city’s energy budget consumed by public lighting networks, the shift to connected LEDs is an obvious path to energy efficiency, greater returns on civic spending, and improved livability. We are proud to utilize technology from a leader such as Philips to make it even easier to unlock these benefits for our customers and communities.”

The combination of connected LED lighting with an open standard, IPv6 networking platform helps cities, utilities, transportation departments, and other network operators dramatically lower energy consumption, improve operational performance, and improve public safety. For example, by making it easy, practical, and less costly to add sensing and wireless connectivity to every light fixture, utilities and cities can have their lighting system provide useful light-point specific data such as asset location, space use patterns, active management and control of energy usage, and remote dimming and illumination capabilities. Once the network canopy is in place, the operators can then reinvest the operational savings and add future IoT applications such as smart energy, water, and gas metering, EV charging, environmental sensing, smart transportation and traffic control systems, intelligent parking, and many others, using the street light network as the back-bone for these additional services.

“Silver Spring manages and operates some of the largest, outdoor critical infrastructure networks on the face of the earth,” Davito continued. “Networked street lights not only deliver immediate benefits such as lower energy consumption and safer roads, but are also the onramp to smart cities. Leveraging that investment for a city, state, or even country-wide network, operators can cost-effectively establish a multi-application network upon which a wide array of smart city applications and sensors can be connected in the future.”