An Intelligent Car Park Management System based on Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted increasing attentions from both academic and industrial communities. It can be deployed in various kinds of environments to monitor and collect information. In this paper, we describe a WSN-based intelligent car parking system. In the system, low-cost wireless sensors are deployed into a car park field, with each parking lot equipped with one sensor node, which detects and monitors the occupation of the parking lot. The status of the parking field detected by sensor nodes is reported periodically to a database via the deployed wireless sensor network and its gateway. The database can be accessed by the upper layer management system to perform various management functions, such as finding vacant parking lots, auto-toll, security management, and statistic report. We have implemented a prototype of the system using crossbow motes. The system evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our design and implementation of the car parking system