Design and Implementation of a Prototype Smart PARKing (SPARK) System Using Wireless Sensor Networks

With the rapid proliferation of vehicle availability and usage in recent years, finding a vacant car parking space is becoming more and more difficult, resulting in a number of practical conflicts. Parking problems are becoming ubiquitous and ever growing at an alarming rate in every major city. Lot of research and development is being done all over the world to implement better and smarter parking management mechanisms. Widespread use of wireless technologies paired with the recent advances in wireless applications for parking, manifests that digital data dissemination could be the key to solve emerging parking problems. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology has attracted increased attention and is rapidly emerging due to their enormous application potential in diverse fields. This buoyant field is expected to provide an efficient and cost-effective solution to the effluent car parking problems. This paper proposes a Smart Parking (SPARK) Management System based on wireless sensor network technology which provides advanced features like remote parking monitoring, automated guidance, and parking reservation mechanism. The paper describes the overall system architecture of SPARK from hardware to software implementation in the view point of sensor networks. We implemented a full-fledged prototype system for parking management to realize the design functionalities and features mentioned. Our preliminary test results show that the performance of this WSN based system can effectively satisfy the needs and requirements of existing parking hassles thereby minimizing the time consumed to find vacant parking lot, real-time information rendering, and smart reservation mechanisms.