Participatory-sensing-enabled efficient Parking Management in modern cities

A growing interest in Internet of things (IoT) paradigm has enabled a wide range of physical objects and environments to be monitored in fine detail by using pervasive sensing and communication devices. In this paper, we develop an IoT framework that targets one of the biggest challenges in modern cities, namely, Parking Management. Populating parking facilities with sensors imposes unwarranted installation and maintenance costs. In our system we eliminate the additional sensing or monitoring facilities, instead use participatory sensing paradigm to find, monitor and regulate parking. In our system volunteers collect and share information from their local environment using smart-devices. We link the user reputation scores to the reliability of user-provided data and determine parking availability and combine them with a reward model for incentives. The validation results through simulated as well as real participatory users have shown that our approach can yield accurate parking spot availability using user provided data.