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IoT based Smart Parking System

Conference Paper · January 2016

DOI: 10.1109/IOTA.2016.7562735

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2016 International Conference on Internet of Things and Applications (IOTA)
Maharashtra Institute of Technology, Pune, India 22 Jan - 24 Jan, 2016

IoT based Smart Parking System

Abhirup Khanna Rishi Anand
University of Petroleum and Energy Studies (UPES) University of Petroleum and Energy Studies (UPES)
Dehradun, Uttarakhand Dehradun, Uttarakhand
abhirupkhanna@yahoo.com rishi.anand0@gmail.com

Abstract— In recent times the concept of smart cities to create and host their applications on it. Cloud acts as a
have gained grate popularity. Thanks to the evolution of perfect partner for IoT as it acts as a platform where all the
Internet of things the idea of smart city now seems to be sensor data can be stored and accessed from remote
achievable. Consistent efforts are being made in the field locations[11]. These factors gave rise to the amalgamation of
of IoT in order to maximize the productivity and reliability both technologies thus leading to the formation of a new
of urban infrastructure. Problems such as, traffic technology called Cloud of Things(CoT). In CoT the
congestion, limited car parking facilities and road safety things(nodes) could be accessed, monitored and controlled
are being addressed by IoT. In this paper, we present an from any remote location through the cloud. Due to high
IoT based cloud integrated smart parking system. The scalability in cloud any number of node could be added or
proposed Smart Parking system consists of an on-site removed from the IoT system on a real time basis. In simple
deployment of an IoT module that is used to monitor and terms IoT can be explained in form of an equation stating:
signalize the state of availability of each single parking
space. A mobile application is also provided that allows an Physical Object + Controller, Sensor and Actuators + Internet
end user to check the availability of parking space and = Internet of Things
book a parking slot accordingly. The paper also describes
a high-level view of the system architecture. Towards the The ideal of creating a Smart City is now becoming possible
end, the paper discusses the working of the system in form with the emergence of the Internet of Things. One of the key
of a use case that proves the correctness of the proposed issues that smart cities relate to are car parking facilities and
model. traffic management systems[3]. In present day cities finding an
available parking spot is always difficult for drivers, and it
Keywords— Internet of Things; Cloud Computing;
tends to become harder with ever increasing number of private
Smart Parking; Smart City; Cloud of Things
car users. This situation can be seen as an opportunity for smart
cities to undertake actions in order enhance the efficiency their
I. INTRODUCTION parking resources thus leading to reduction in searching times,
The concept of Internet of Things (IoT) started with things with traffic congestion and road accidents. Problems pertaining to
identity communication devices. The devices could be tracked, parking and traffic congestion can be solved if the drivers can
controlled or monitored using remote computers connected be informed in advance about the availability of parking spaces
through Internet. IoT extends the use of Internet providing the at and around their intended destination. Recent advances in
communication, and thus inter-network of the devices and creating low-cost, low-power embedded systems are helping
physical objects, or ‘Things’. The two prominent words in IoT developers to build new applications for Internet of Things.
are “internet” and “things”. Internet means a vast global Followed by the developments in sensor technology, many
network of connected servers, computers, tablets and mobiles modern cities have opted for deploying various IoT based
using the internationally used protocols and connecting systems in and around the cities for the purpose of monitoring.
systems. Internet enables sending, receiving, or communicating A recent survey performed by the International Parking
of information. Thing in English has number of uses and Institute [6] reflects an increase in number of innovative ideas
meanings. Dictionary meaning of ‘Thing’ is a term used to related to parking systems. At present there are certain parking
reference to a physical object, an action or idea, situation or systems[8] that claim to citizens of delivering real time
activity, in case when we do not wish to be precise. IoT, in information about available parking spaces. Such systems
general consists of inter-network of the devices and physical require efficient sensors to be deployed in the parking areas for
objects, number of objects can gather the data at remote monitoring the occupancy as well as quick data processing
locations and communicate to units managing, acquiring, units in order to gain practical insights from data collected over
organizing and analyzing the data in the processes and services. various sources.
It provides a vision where things (wearable, watch, alarm
clock, home devices, surrounding objects with) become smart The smart parking system that we propose is implemented
and behave alive through sensing, computing and using a mobile application that is connected to the cloud. The
communicating by embedded small devices which interact with system helps a user know the availability of parking spaces on
remote objects or persons through connectivity. The scalable a real time basis. The rest of the paper is organized as follows:
and robust nature of Cloud computing is allowing developers Section II talks about the factors responsible of Cloud-IoT

978-1-5090-0044-9/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE 266

integration. Section III presents the state-of-the-art in smart x Availability: Any time any where availability of
parking system. Section IV describes the implementation and resources becomes very easy with cloud integration.
working of the system. Section V concludes the paper. Many of the cloud providers assure 5 nine availability.
With cloud, the applications are always up and
running and continuous services are being provided to
II. NEED FOR IOT-CLOUD INTEGRATION the end users.
Cloud computing and IoT have witnessed large evolution. Both
the technologies have their advantages, however several mutual x Interoperability: IoT involves the use of devices that
advantages can be foreseen from their integration. On one are heterogeneous in nature. These devices may have
hand, IoT can address its technological constraints such as different hardware or software configurations as a
storage, processing and energy by leveraging the unlimited result causing compatibility issues. It becomes very
capabilities and resources of Cloud[4]. On the other hand, difficult in an IoT environment to ensure
Cloud can also extend its reach to deal with real world entities interoperability among these devices[19]. Cloud helps
in a more distributed and dynamic fashion by the use of IoT. in addressing this problem as it provides a common
Basically, the Cloud acts as an intermediate between things and platform where various devices can connect and
applications, in order to hide all the complexities and interact. Devices are allowed to share and exchange
functionalities necessary for running the application. Below are data in a format that is acceptable to them.
some of the factors that led to the amalgamation of Cloud and
IoT.
x Storage capacity: IoT comprises of a large number of III. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
information sources (things), which produce huge This section describes the high level architecture for the smart
amounts of non-structured or semi-structured data. As parking system along with a mathematical model. The parking
a result IoT requires collecting, accessing, processing, system that we propose comprises of various actors that work
visualizing and sharing large amounts of data[14]. in sync with one another. Below is the mathematical model that
Cloud provides unlimited, low-cost, and on-demand defines our smart parking system.
storage capacity, thus making it the best and most cost
effective solution to deal with data generated by IoT. Table 1: Nomenclature Table
The data stored on the Cloud can be accessed and SYMBOL MEANING
visualized from anywhere through standard APIs. T Parking time
C Driver’s car number
x Computation power: The devices being used under P Amount paid
IoT have limited processing capabilities. Data U User ID
collected from various sensors is usually transmitted S Parking slot
to more powerful nodes where its aggregation and Mi Driver
processing can be done[18]. The computation needs O Occupancy rate
of IoT can be addressed by the use of unlimited X() Input function
processing capabilities and on-demand model of Y() Output function
Cloud. With the help of cloud computing, IoT systems F() Computation function
could perform real-time processing of data thus I() Identity function
facilitating highly responsive applications.
Mi ĺ X(T,C,P,U,S) // Driver provides input to the input
x Communication resources. The basic functionality of function
IoT is to make IP-enabled devices communicate with
one another through dedicated set of hardware. Cloud X()ĺF(S,T) // Input function notifies the computation
computing offers cheap and effective ways of function
connecting, tracking, and managing devices from
anywhere over the internet[16]. By the use of built-in X()ĺI(P,C,U) // Input function notifies the identity function
applications IoT systems could monitor and control
things on a real-time basis through remote locations. Oi= F(S,T)ĺY() // Computation function notifies the output
x Scalability: Cloud provides a scalable approach function and the resultant is stored in form of the occupancy
towards IoT. It allows increase or decrease in rate.
resources in a dynamic fashion. Any number of
“things” could be added or subtracted from the system Oi= 0Ň1 // Occupancy rate can either be 0 or 1. Where 0
when cloud integration is provided[22]. The cloud specifies occupied and 1 means vacant.
allocates resources in accordance with the
requirements of things and applications. The following figure gives an outlined view of the complete
system.

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 TCP/IP protocol. It is designed to establish
connections across remote locations where limited
amount of data needs to be transferred or in cases of
low bandwidth availability.

x Mobile application: The mobile application acts like

an interface for the end users to interact with the
system. The application is developed in Apache
Cordova and Angular Js framework using Javascript
as a programming language. The purpose of using
Apache Cordova is to create applications that can run
on both android and iOS platform with the same
source code. The application is connected with the
IBM MQTT server through a secure channel and a 2
factor authorization. The purpose of this mobile
application is to provide information regarding
Figure 1: Smart Parking System availability of parking spaces and allowing the end
user to book a slot accordingly. Transfer of data takes
Talking of the above mentioned figure, it depicts a parking area place in JSON format between IBM MQTT server
where our parking system is implementation along with the and the mobile application. In order to ensure proper
way in which communication happens between various actors. communication both the Raspberry pi and mobile
The primary actors that constitute the parking system are: application must be subscribed to a particular channel
on IBM MQTT server.
x Parking Sensors: For our parking system we have
made use of sensors like Infrared, Passive x The Cloud: The IBM MQTT server is hosted on
Infrared(PIR) and Ultrasonic Sensors. The work of cloud. Cloud acts as a data base to store all the records
these sensors is the same i.e. to sense the parking area related to parking areas and end users that have access
and determine whether a parking slot is vacant or not. to the system. It keeps a track of every user connected
In this case we are using ultrasonic sensors to detect to the system and maintains information such as time
the presence of a car. The ultrasonic sensors are at which the car was parked, time duration for parking
wirelessly connected to raspberry pi using the a car, amount paid by the user and mode of payment.
ESP8266 chip. An ESP8266 WiFi chip comprises of It is due to the flexible nature of cloud which permits
a self contained SOC with integrated TCP/IP protocol the system to add any number of users at any time of
stack that allows any microcontroller to access a WiFi the day. Continuous backup is made of the data stored
network. The sensors are connected to a 5V supply on cloud in order to ensure easy and quick recovery of
either from raspberry pi or an external source. data in case of any kind of system failure.
External source being more preferable.
On closely looking at the figure one gets to see that
x Processing Unit: It comprises of Raspberry pi which empty parking spaces are indicated by red light in
is a processor on chip. The processing unit acts like an Lane A whereas green light in Lane B. This is due to
intermediate between the sensors and cloud. All the the fact that in case of Lane A although there is no car
sensors are wirelessly connected to the processing currently parked but there still is a red light because
unit. A single raspberry pi unit comprises of 26 GPIO the slot has already been booked by some user. On the
pins i.e. 26 different sensors can be connected to it. other hand, the parking slot in Lane B shows green
However we can increase this number by attaching a light because it neither has a booking nor a car parked
multiplexer (MUX) to it. It is essential that the ground in it.
of raspberry pi and sensors must be connected in order
to transfer data using the GPIO pins. There is a python
script running on the chip that checks the status of IV. IMPLEMENTATION & WORKING
various GPIO pins and updates this information onto In the previous section we discussed about the architecture
the cloud. Data collected from various sensors is sent and technical stack related to the smart parking system. In this
to the raspberry pi through the esp8266 chip. The section we talk about the implimtation and working of the
raspberry pi then transmits this data to the IBM system in a real world scenario. The complete process of
MQTT Server through MQTT protocol over a booking a parking slot, parking a car in that slot and leaving
channel. MQTT[15] (Message Queue Telemetry the parking area is explained with the help of the following
Transport) Protocol is a publish-subscribe based "light flow chart.
weight" messaging protocol that is used on top of the

268
 Figure 2: Flow chart of the system

We conducted an experiment in order to depict the working of Figure 3: Booking a parking slot
our system at every stage from checking the availability of
parking space to actually park a car in a vacant parking slot. The above figure depicts the presence of vacant and
This is done by implementing the smart parking system in the occupied parking slots. In this case parking slots
parking area of a shopping mall. Below are the steps that a named A1 and A3 are vacant whereas slot A2 is
driver needs to follow in order to park its car using our occupies. The driver chooses the A1 parking slot.
parking system.

x Step 1: Insall the smart parking application on your

mobile device.

x Step 2: With the help of the mobile app search for a

parking area on and around your destination.

x Step 3: Select a particular parking area.

x Step 4: Browse through the various parking slots

available in that parking area.

x Step 5: Select a particular parking slot.

Figure 4: Selecting the amount of time
x Step 6: Select the amount of time (in hours) for which
you would like to park your car for.
The above figure depicts the scenario when a driver
needs to specify the amount of time for which it needs
x Step 7: Pay the parking charges either with your e- the selected parking slot. In this case the driver
wallet or your credit card. selects the 1 hour option.
x Step 8: Once you have successfully parked your car in
the selected parking slot, confirm your occupancy
using the mobile application.

The above mentioned procedure for booking a slot and parking

a car in that very slot is explained with the help of the
following screenshots.

Figure 5: Occupancy check

269
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