A Smart Street Lighting Control System for Urban Areas in Ogun State

Inefficient street lighting in Nigerian urban areas contributes to high electricity costs, poor road safety, and inadequate night security. This study develops a smart street lighting control system for urban areas in Ogun State, South West Nigeria, using IoT sensors to automate lighting based on ambient light levels and motion detection. The hardware layer uses ESP32 microcontrollers with LDR sensors and PIR motion detectors, communicating over MQTT to a cloud server hosted on AWS IoT Core. A Node.js backend processes telemetry data and exposes a web dashboard for Ogun State government engineers. The iterative model guides three implementation phases, evaluated across 12 streetlight nodes deployed in Abeokuta's Oke-Mosan and Kemta districts. Evaluation tracks energy consumption reduction, fault detection response time, and maintenance cost savings over 90 days. Results demonstrate a 43 percent reduction in electricity consumption compared to the preceding always-on lighting system, and fault alerts were generated and resolved within an average of 6 hours. The study recommends scaling the system to Sagamu and Ijebu-Ode corridors and partnering with the Ogun State Rural and Infrastructure Development Agency (ORIDA) for coordinated deployment. This research presents a software-hardware integrated solution to urban infrastructure challenges in South West Nigeria. Keywords: smart street lighting, IoT, Ogun State, energy efficiency, MQTT