A Prototype Parking System using Wireless Sensor Networks

With the rapid proliferation of vehicle availability and usage in recent years, finding a vacant car parking space is becoming more and more difficult, resulting in a number of practical conflicts. Parking problems are becoming ubiquitous and ever growing at an alarming rate in every major city. Wide usage of wireless technologies with the recent advances in wireless applications for parking, manifests that digital data dissemination could be the key to solve emerging parking problems. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies have attracted increased attention and are rapidly emerging due to their enormous application potential in diverse fields. This field is expected to provide an efficient and cost-effective solution to the effluent car parking problems. This paper proposes a Smart Parking Management System based on wireless sensor network technology which provides advanced features like remote parking monitoring, automated guidance, and parking reservation mechanism. The paper describes the overall system architecture of our embedded system from hardware to software implementation in the view point of sensor networks. This paper also shows that the pre existing security surveillance (CCTVs) will be used as a sensing nodes to identify vacant parking space. The captured image will be processed through the ARM7 Microcontroller and the processed data will be transmitted via ZigBee to a central computer to store and update the occupancy status of available parking space vacancies in the database. The performance of this WSN based system can effectively satisfy the needs and requirements of existing parking hassles thereby minimizing the time consumed to find vacant parking lot, real time information rendering, and smart reservation mechanisms.