Efficient Communication Model for a Smart Parking System with Multiple Data Consumers

Abstract

A smart parking system (SPS) is an integral part of smart cities where Internet of Things (IoT) technology provides many innovative urban digital solutions. It offers hassle-free parking convenience to the city dwellers, metering facilities, and a revenue source for businesses, and it also protects the environment by cutting down drive-around emissions. The real-time availability information of parking slots and the duration of occupancy are valuable data utilized by multiple sectors such as parking management, charging electric vehicles (EV), car servicing, urban infrastructure planning, traffic regulation, etc. IPv6 wireless mesh networks are a good choice to implement a fail-safe, low-power and Internet protocol (IP)-based secure communication infrastructure for connecting heterogeneous IoT devices. In a smart parking lot, there could be a variety of local IoT devices that consume the occupancy data generated from the parking sensors. For instance, there could be a central parking management system, ticketing booths, display boards showing a count of free slots and color-coded lights indicating visual clues for vacancy. Apart from this, there are remote user applications that access occupancy data from browsers and mobile phones over the Internet. Both the types of data consumers need not collect their inputs from the cloud, as it is beneficial to offer local data within the network. Hence, an SPS with multiple data consumers needs an efficient communication model that provides reliable data transfers among producers and consumers while minimizing the overall energy consumption and data transit time. This paper explores different SPS communication models by varying the number of occupancy data collators, their positions, hybrid power cycles and data aggregation strategies. In addition, it proposes a concise data format for effective data dissemination. Based on the simulation studies, a multi-collator model along with a data superimposition technique is found to be the best for realizing an efficient smart parking system.