WSN and IP based parking management system

As the cities are becoming more and more dense, multi-story parking places have become the order of the day. Further due to the escalation in the manpower cost, parking management and guidance has become an issue and hence inclination towards automation. The big commercial malls, airports etc. have either horizontal or vertical parking slots for huge number of vehicles. It is economical and convenient for not only providing guidance for parking their vehicles, closest to the en try/ exit but also for parking fee collection. In this process of automation, the user can be served better by clearly showing directions towards an immediate and desired empty parking slot, thus minimising the search / recovery time from about 5-10 minutes to nearly zero. This also greatly reduces fuel, noise and air pollution in the parking space due to the reduction in searching time. The system also can easily help in giving direction to the parked vehicle, which many times eliminates the user´s confusion. The IP connectivity to the system will further help privileged customers, book their slot by looking at the available free slots, which will further enhance the income to the establishments. The paper presents the design concepts of a parking assistance system based on wireless sensor networks technology integrated with IP capability using wireless microcontrollers. The assistance system automatically communicates the status of each and every parking slot to a central server. This information is used to guide the user to the nearest free parking slot or to the user´s parked vehicle. Further the system can also reserve the predefined slots for a specific time period for privileged users.