Security in a Smart Lighting System: a Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) vision enables the development of a wide range of application scenarios, including the smart lighting systems. Since the electrical energy consumption for street lighting is a significant part of total energy consumption of a city, the development of smart lighting systems represents a very interesting research topic. Moreover, adding communication capabilities and Internet access to these systems allows the development of additional services able to substantially improve citizens' satisfaction and safety. However, the use of the untrusted Internet makes security a primary issue in the design of such applications. Among all the emerging technologies, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) represents as the ideal choice for the development of smart systems, thanks to the ability of sensor nodes to self-configure and self-organize. Several studies on the use of WSNs to develop Smart Lighting System have been recently presented in literature. However, most of them do not take into account security issues and, therefore, propose solutions not usable in a real environment. In this paper the security problem in a Smart Lighting System is analyzed and the main protocols used to minimize the risk of security attacks in a WSN are described.