MagnoPark - Locating On-Street Parking Spaces Using Magnetometer-Based Pedestrians' Smartphones

In heavily congested urban areas, the rapid growth of population is becoming more and more of an issue. Affected cities quickly demand solutions to areas such as quality of life, waste management, public transportation, and accessibility to main resources. However, since the number of impacted areas of population growth is endless, we focus on public parking. Studies show that drivers spend a large portion of their travel time locating vacant parking spots. For this reason, we present MagnoPark, a crowdsourced approach to identifying unoccupied spots accessible to the general public, who are typically free. MagnoPark is a smartphone based sensing solution that detects empty parking spots using internal sensors of cellphones. While a pedestrian is walking on the sidewalk, we exploit magnetometer changes near metal objects in identifying where cars are located. The amplitude and rate of change shift dramatically when approaching or passing cars that are parked beside the street, giving us a great platform towards solving the defined problem. With empirical evaluation, we show that not only is our solution a notable step towards economical parking management but also significantly efficient and as accurate as traditional sensor- based parking solutions.