Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies has launched a "smart" street lighting system to enable cities to enhance the control and performance of street facilities.

On March 15, Huawei debuted its lighting system at CeBIT 2016, which was held from March 14 to 18 in Hannover, Germany.

Huawei's system provides municipal managers with status information on each lamp, in every street and enables precise control of on-off switches and brightness of individual street lamps, allowing on-demand lighting and helping reduce energy consumption by up to 80 percent, according to Huawei.

Lighting is attracting several new competitors of late, including domestic technology companies such as ZTE Technology Co.

Huawei has its own advantage this time as its solution is built on IPv6-based 6LoWPAN wireless platform, which has lower power consumption, and can automatically diagnose, network, and trouble-shoot problems, as well as enable better interaction between street lamps and other smart devices such as sensors, according to media reports.

Networking supplier Samsung Electronics Co and Silver Spring Networks also announced a partnership to develop a networked LED street lights system on March 15, which will provide similar services to Huawei's.

Smart lighting is a likely trend for the future, but establishing such networks in all cities will be challenging, requiring a lot of time and money, according to a report from it.sohu.com on Tuesday that cited Liu Hongbin, an engineer from Shandong Smart Living Data Services Co.

Smart systems also offer energy savings on city's power usage as in London, for example, about 35,000 streetlights burn through an estimated 56,000,000 kilowatt-hour a year.