Streetlights are one of the major contributors of a city's energy usage, creating a large carbon footprint especially for highly populated areas. Current streetlights are turned on and off based on fixed schedule or by light sensors. Previous works have suggested the dimming of streetlights during zero traffic conditions to reduce energy consumption. This requires a reliable and economical communication backbone to ensure minimal service disruption. This work presents the design and performance evaluation of LoRa-based smart streetlight controllers in an urban environment. The deployment was designed to provide stress test, simulate communication connectivity, maintenance routine, firmware test and environmental conditions. The setup may also be used for staff training purposes and demonstration. The results of this work may be used achieve the effective control method for power saving, system stability, robustness and long-term performance. The deployed system includes test controllers, nodes, application server, database, gateway server and visualization dashboard. The system design demonstrated low packet error rates of approximately 1% and command response time of less than 3s in real world conditions.
