Developing Smart Car Parking System Using Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Car parking is a serious problem and one of the major contributors to traffic congestion in urban areas. This challenge is as a result of sharp increase in numbers of automobiles on the roads. This paper presents the development of a smart parking system using wireless sensor networks. The system can monitor the state of every parking lot by deploying a magnetic sensor node on each lot and also identify improper parking using infrared sensor to check if vehicles are properly parked. The system uses Xbee radio for transmitting information to the base station which performs necessary information processing, analysis and interpretation on the data received to usable and meaningful format for the end users. The results obtained after qualitative testing of the developed prototype shows that server concurrency utilization is in the average of 12 users per minute. It was also observed that the system acquire speedup in terms of average response time of 1.414 seconds. This implies that the system is robust to handle large number of users and is also fast enough in terms of response which gives accurate information about the parking lot. With the system in place, traffic related hazards, fuel wastage and other relted hazards could be reduced.