Connected lighting
for smart cities.
A reference for the people who plan, procure and operate the next decade of public lighting. At its centre is the IoT platform: an open control and telemetry layer over the existing estate — with reference architecture, platform capabilities, and a security baseline built to European standards.
Connected lighting
for smart cities.
Public lighting is the most visible piece of urban infrastructure and one of the least connected. Many estates still run on fixed schedules, with no per-luminaire telemetry and no capacity to respond to occupancy, weather or astronomical conditions.
The standard remedy — a vendor-bundled "smart lighting" platform — trades one problem for another: a closed control plane that locks municipalities into a single supplier for the operational life of the asset, often 20 years.
This whitepaper presents a different path: an open IoT platform for cloud-based lighting control — vendor-neutral at every interface, hardened to European standards, and operable even without a software background. The focus is deliberately on the platform, not on individual hardware.
- 01Introduction — from street lighting to the Smart Cityp. 03
- 02Smart City — but how? Challenges in lighting controlp. 04
- 03Advantages of smart, open lighting controlp. 05
- 04What actually makes a complete solutionp. 06
- 05The open IoT platformp. 07
- 06grovez.io in practicep. 09
- 07Areas of applicationp. 12
- 08Impact & sustainabilityp. 13
- 09Security & compliancep. 14
- 10Summary & recommendations for actionp. 15
What you'll take away
Evaluate openness in a control platform
Beyond marketing copy: which interfaces must be open — LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, MQTT and API — for a system to be genuinely vendor-neutral, and why open source guards against lock-in.
A security baseline to European standard
GDPR, EU-resident, C5-ready, CRA-ready, RBAC & MFA, LoRaWAN security by design — carefully framed, with no certification promises.
Operate a mixed-protocol estate
Living with LoRaWAN, NB-IoT and MQTT simultaneously, without a parallel control system per protocol.
No radio network of your own required
A LoRaWAN server on an open-source base (ChirpStack): self-host or let us run it — plus roaming, gateway partners and consulting.
Energy & sustainability, evidenced
Up to 80% less consumption (source: European Commission) and a documented, auditable contribution to UN goals SDG 11, 13 and 15.
Platform over hardware
How the IoT platform unifies app onboarding, real-time monitoring, adaptive control and energy monitoring in one interface — without a manual.
Talk to the people
who wrote it.
The whitepaper is the public version. Got questions about the reference architecture, or want to apply it to your own estate? Talk directly to the team that wrote it.