Volume 11 • Issue 2 • PP: 01–04 • 2026
Guardian Light: An Edge-Resilient Fail-Safe Mechanism for IoT Smart Lighting Against DDoS and Network Partitions
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New cybersecurity and operational resilience issues have been brought about by the growing use of cloud managed
smart street lighting in metropolitan settings, especially in the event of network partitioning and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults. Current systems still rely mostly on centralized cloud control, which creates a single point of failure that might compromise public safety and interfere with vital lighting functions. In the context of the author’s Streetlight-as-a-Service (SLaaS) framework, where streetlights operate as intelligent, service-capable infrastructure nodes rather than discrete lighting devices, this paper proposes Guardian Light, an edge-resilient fail-safe mechanism for intelligent street lighting. The suggested design uses AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Device Defender, and AWS IoT Greengrass to combine device-side autonomous governance with cloud-side anomaly detection. With the help of an internal real-time clock, state-aware failover logic, persistent offline scheduling, and local threshold monitoring, Guardian Light makes it possible for lighting nodes to continue operating safely and consistently even in the event that malicious traffic is discovered or cloud connectivity is compromised. The study emphasizes how current smart lighting research goes beyond energy saving and scheduling to cyber-resilient operational continuity through the integration of edge intelligence and service-oriented streetlight design. By doing this, the study offers a workable and theoretically sound solution to improve the autonomy, security, and dependability of next-generation SLaaS-enabled smart city systems.
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References
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