ZigBee based multi-level parking vacancy monitoring system

Looking for empty parking spaces in congested parking spaces can be painstaking and time consuming. The average time spent in parking bays cruising for vacant spaces approximately varies from 3.5-12 minutes. These cruising cars also add to the traffic and also to the pollution inside the bay. The present parking management system in the urban cities of growing economies like India lacks efficiency, often leaving the drivers frustrated. We are engaged in developing an automated parking management system employing Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology. The parking management system can detect the presence and/or absence of a vehicle in the respective parking spaces and automatically provide the location of the identified available spaces to prospective users in real-time. This paper describes the ultrasonic based vehicle detection system, ZigBee networks and presents the preliminary results.