Glossary
Smart city & IoT glossary
Plain-language definitions for the products, protocols and concepts that come up across this site — from Dimonoff’s own platforms to the open standards they run on.
Dimonoff products & platforms
- SCMS
- Smart City Management System — Dimonoff’s unified platform for managing connected city infrastructure, including lighting, parking, security and environmental monitoring.
- RME
- Smart Wireless Lighting Node (external controller) — wireless smart street lighting control compatible with ANSI C136.41 and Zhaga Book 18 receptacles.
- RTM
- Smart Wireless Lighting Node (internal controller) — wireless intelligent lighting control for decorative or architectural lighting systems, equipped with analog and digital I/O.
- LNLV
- Smart Wireless Lighting Node (low-voltage controller) — a low-voltage smart wireless lighting node for low-voltage lighting applications.
- Gateway G4
- Current-generation IoT gateway providing secure connectivity, data aggregation and edge processing for up to 1,000 nodes, independently of Dimonoff SCMS.
- Spatium
- Intelligent parking management platform integrated with SCMS, providing real-time parking availability, dynamic pricing and occupancy optimization.
- CitySafe
- Dimonoff security solution integrating surveillance, access control and incident management with SCMS for comprehensive urban security.
- DOO Express
- Rapid deployment framework for quick-launch smart city solutions in small municipalities.
IoT & smart city concepts
- IoT
- Internet of Things — a network of interconnected physical devices embedded with sensors, software and communication capabilities.
- Smart city
- An urban area using IoT sensors, data analytics and automated systems to optimize infrastructure, services and the citizen experience.
- Edge computing
- Processing data at the network edge (gateway or device level) rather than in the cloud, reducing latency and bandwidth requirements.
- Real-time monitoring
- Continuous collection and analysis of device data, giving immediate visibility into system performance and status.
- Data aggregation
- Collecting and combining sensor data from multiple sources into unified datasets for analysis and decision-making.
- Connectivity
- The ability of IoT devices to communicate using wireless or wired protocols — on this site, Wi-SUN FAN, DigiMesh, LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, LTE-M, Ethernet and cellular.
- Occupancy optimization
- Using sensor data to understand and improve space utilization, including parking availability and traffic flow.
- Adaptive lighting
- Dynamic control of street lighting intensity based on traffic, weather and time — reducing energy use while maintaining safety.
Standards & protocols
- TALQ
- The TALQ Consortium is an industry group that publishes the TALQ Smart City Protocol, an open interface between central management systems and outdoor lighting or smart city device networks. TALQ is the consortium’s name, not an acronym.
- DALI
- Digital Addressable Lighting Interface — a protocol for controlling individual light fixtures with precise dimming and status feedback.
- Zhaga Book 18
- A standard specifying smart outdoor lighting module interfaces, enabling interoperability between manufacturers.
- ANSI C136.41
- The ANSI/NEMA standard for the dimming receptacle on outdoor luminaires: a twist-lock photocontrol socket with 7 pins (or 5), where the extra pins carry the 0–10 V dimming signal. A controller such as the RME plugs into it to switch, dim and meter the fixture without rewiring.
- NEMA 7-pin receptacle
- The twist-lock socket on top of a streetlight defined by ANSI C136.41: pins 1–3 switch the fixture, pins 4–5 carry the 0–10 V dimming signal, and pins 6–7 are free for a sensor. A smart streetlight controller such as the RME plugs into it in seconds, with no rewiring.
- Photocontrol
- The light-sensing switch on a streetlight that turns it on at dusk and off at dawn. A networked controller replaces the plain photocontrol in the same socket and keeps the function: the RME’s integrated photocell works from the moment it is installed, before the node joins a network.
- LoRaWAN
- Long Range Wide Area Network — a low-power, wide-range wireless protocol well suited to IoT sensor networks in smart cities.
- MQTT
- Message Queuing Telemetry Transport — a lightweight protocol for device-to-cloud communication with minimal bandwidth.
Energy & infrastructure
- Smart lighting
- Connected street and facility lighting systems that automatically adjust brightness, color and timing based on real-time conditions.
- Energy efficiency
- Optimizing energy consumption while maintaining or improving service quality — a core principle of Dimonoff solutions.
- Dimming control
- Automatic reduction of light intensity based on traffic sensors, time of day or weather conditions.
- Power management
- Monitoring and optimizing power consumption across networked devices to reduce operating costs.
- Central management system (CMS)
- The software that a city’s lighting operators work in: the map of every fixture, its status, its energy use and its faults, plus the schedules and dimming profiles applied to groups of lights. Dimonoff | SCMS is a CMS that also manages other assets and nodes from other manufacturers.
- LED streetlight conversion
- Replacing high-pressure sodium or metal-halide fixtures with LED. The energy saving comes from the fixture; adding a networked controller during the same conversion adds dimming, scheduling and per-fixture fault reporting while the crew is already at the pole.
- Remote lighting management (télégestion)
- The term used in Quebec and France for operating a lighting network from a central platform: switching, dimming, monitoring and diagnosing every fixture remotely instead of driving to it. The English equivalent is smart street lighting control.
Security & compliance
- Law 25 (Quebec)
- Quebec’s 2021 law modernizing the protection of personal information for public bodies and enterprises: where information is kept, how it is protected, and what assessment is needed before it leaves the province. For a municipal IoT platform the practical question is data residency, answered by hosting in Canada or on the municipality’s own premises.
- Data residency
- The country or jurisdiction where a system’s data is physically stored. Dimonoff | SCMS offers certified cloud hosting with data residency in Canada, or an on-premise deployment where the data never leaves the customer’s infrastructure.
- SOC 2 Type II
- An independent audit, over a period of months, of an organization’s controls for security, availability and confidentiality. Groupe Vectanor, Dimonoff’s parent, completed one in 2026.