2009 International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops
Design and Implementation of a prototype Smart
PARKing (SPARK) System using Wireless Sensor
Networks
S. V. Srikanth, Pramod P. J, Dileep K. P, Tapas S, Mahesh U. Patil, Sarat Chandra Babu N
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)
Website: http://www.cdac.in
{venkatas, pramodpj, dileepkp, stapas, maheshp, sarat} @cdac.in
Abstract—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. Lot
of research and development is being done all over the world to
implement better and smarter parking management mechanisms.
Widespread use of wireless technologies paired 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) technology
has attracted increased attention and are rapidly emerging due
to their enormous application potential in diverse fields. This
buoyant field is expected to provide an efficient and cost-effective
solution to the effluent car parking problems.
This paper proposes a Smart Parking (SPARK) 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 SPARK from
hardware to software implementation in the view point of sensor
networks. We implemented a full-fledged prototype system for
parking management to realize the design functionalities and
features mentioned. Our preliminary test results show that 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.
Index Terms—Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Smart Park-
ing, Remote Monitoring, Automated Guidance, Lot Reservation
I. I NTRODUCTION
We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in
neglecting them we neglect the nation.
John F. Kennedy,
(Statement to Congress, January 30, 1962)
Recent increase in the growth of automotive industry cou-
pled with the perpetual demand of commuters urged the
need for better and smarter parking mechanisms. Though
lot of researches were conducted in this area, most of the
existing parking management systems rarely address the issues
of parking space management, vehicle guidance, parking lot
reservation etc. Majority of these systems have control at
the entrance & exit and use vehicle detectors as an essential
978-0-7695-3639-2/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE 401
DOI 10.1109/WAINA.2009.53
element to provide smart parking. Though inductive loop is
one of the most widely used detectors today [4], it includes
various problems in installation and maintenance which might
disturb the normal operations of parking.
The widespread use of wireless technologies paired with
the advancement in wireless applications for parking implies
that digital data dissemination could be the key for resolving
the growing parking challenges. WSN have a great potential
towards providing an easy and cost effective solution to this
credible application for various reasons. Ease of deployment
in existing parking lots without excavation and expensive
cable installations has increased our attention towards wireless
sensor network technology. Flexibility to couple with sophis-
ticated but cheap sensors that can accurately detect vehicles
makes WSN a natural candidate to solve the emerging car
parking problems.
Wireless sensor network usually consists of a large number
of nodes that are deployed in the sensing area and are equipped
with different kinds of sensing, computation and communi-
cation units. These functional units enable WSN nodes to
cooperatively collect, process, and transmit information to the
sink.
Compared with the existing parking management systems,
this paper proposes a Smart PARKing (SPARK) solution
based on wireless sensor network technology. Our choice
was motivated by the need for an automated, cost-effective,
real time and easy-to-use system for car parking. The pro-
posed system is capable of monitoring & managing individual
parking spaces, providing automated guidance and advanced
reservation services as well.
In the remainder of this paper, we present the complete
overview of Smart Parking (SPARK) Management System,
including the design and implementation of the developed pro-
totype model as part of the project. We begin with a detailed
discussion of related works on various parking management
systems using WSN. In section 3, we describe the system
architecture of our proposed system and its functional compo-
nents. Section 4 discusses the subsystem level interactions and
user interfaces to the system. As a proof of concept, we present
a full fledged prototype deployment and give some preliminary
experimental results in section 5. Finally we conclude the
paper in section 6.
 II. R ELATED W ORKS
In this section we review the literature on existing and
proposed parking lot applications based on WSN.
Lee, Yoon and Ghosh proposed a hybrid approach [1] for an
intelligent parking system using a combination of ultrasonic
and magnetic sensors. They demonstrated promising results
through various real world experiments and showed that these
hybrid solutions are more practical and accurate. Though the
main goal was to count the number of vehicles on each floor
and provide a cheap and accurate solution, the scope of their
work restricts itself to vehicle detection using WSN than
providing a smarter parking management solution.
D-Systems Project [2] presented various issues for a re-
liable WSN system using magnetic sensors. As part of this
project an implementation of a car-park management system
using a tiered architecture is detailed using magnetic sensor
boards. They proposed various recommendations on the use
of dynamic & robust routing, delayed retransmissions, etc.
Iris-Net [3] proposed a wide-area sensor network architec-
ture using video cameras, microphones, and motion detectors.
These sensing devices were used to detect the availability of
parking spaces. Through their web applications, clients were
able to acquire real time parking information. However, the
proposed system generated large amount of data resulting in
high power scavenging and communication bandwidth which
are considered to be the major limitations of WSN.
Jatuporn et al. [4], proposed optical WSN as a vehicle
counting system in smart parking garages. Their proposed
solution is to add another optical sensor head to the wireless
sensor node. Two sensor heads were used to classify the
objects of different sizes thereby distinguishing and identifying
different vehicles.
III. S YSTEM A RCHITECTURE
In this section, we describe the design of Smart Parking
(SPARK) management system which consists of WSN, Sink,
Parking Management, Automated Guidance, Entrance Display
and Client Reservation subsystems. At a glance, the system
shall be able to graphically display real time information
related to the availability of parking lots to the users and would
also enable users to reserve parking lot from remote locations.
The system will also be capable of guiding users to efficiently
locate vacant parking spaces so as to park their cars quickly
and safely.
Figure 1 details the system architecture of SPARK. The
overall architecture is divided into six major subsystems as
mentioned. The functions of each subsystem are as follows.
A. WSN Subsystem
WSN subsystem mainly deals with monitoring of parking
status. This subsystem detects the status of parking space
with hybrid sensing techniques and transmits status informa-
tion through RF. It also receives commands from parking
management subsystem to carry out various procedures. The
subsystem internally consists of four major modules which
includes sensing, routing, dissemination and status modules.
402
Fig. 1. System Architecture of SPARK
B. Sink Subsystem
The sink subsystem collects the parking status report from
WSN subsystem and delivers them to the parking management
subsystem. It acts as a gateway between wireless sensor
network and external networks. This subsystem also forwards
the information regarding the change in parking status re-
ceived from management subsystem to the guidance subsystem
through WiFi/Bluetooth/RF interfaces.
C. Parking Management Subsystem
This subsystem acts as the heart of entire SPARK system.
Whenever sink subsystem sends data to the parking manage-
ment subsystem, the gateway transceiver module associated
with the subsystem receives the data, processes it and forwards
to the database module and vice versa. The database module
stores the event based sensor data and the health information
of the sensor nodes.
The sensor & guiding node information from the database
will be collected by the parking guidance module and displays
the corresponding information on the parking lot GUI. It also
takes the health information from sensor health monitoring
module & displays on GUI. Parking entrance display module
existing on this subsystem gets consolidated status information
from the database and then processes the information to be
sent to the parking entrance display.
Whenever the client reserves a parking lot, the reservation
message will be forwarded to parking reservation module
running on the management subsystem. It will further retrieve
data from the sensor database and based on the availability of
parking lots will forward an acknowledgment to the client.
D. Automated Guidance Subsystem
Guiding nodes divide their managing areas into several
sections according to the turn offs of the parking layout. This
subsystem helps vehicles to find idle parking spaces within
less time. It consists of 2 modules which are as follows:
1) Guiding Application: If there is a change in the status,
the management subsystem processes the information and
forwards it to the sink subsystem. The processed data is
then forwarded by sink subsystem to the guiding application
running on the guidance subsystem, which is later depicted on
parking guidance display.
 2) Parking Guidance Display: This module collects the
information from the guiding application and displays it to
the users. It shows the availability of the parking lots in all
three directions (Left/Right/Ahead).
E. Entrance Display Subsystem
As the name suggests, this subsystem is placed at the
entrance of the parking. It shows the status of the parking lots
to the users before entering the parking area. This subsystem
is divided into 2 modules as follows:
1) Entrance Display Application: Whenever there is a
change in the status, the parking entrance display module
on the management subsystem processes the information and
forwards it to the parking entrance display subsystem. The en-
trance display application running on this subsystem receives
and processes the data. The processed data is then forwarded
to the parking entrance display for displaying the status.
2) Parking Entrance Display: This module displays the
parking status information to the users received from the
entrance display application. It shows the complete status of
the whole parking layout (Total lots occupied/vacant).
F. Client Subsystem
Client Subsystem is the one which allows the clients to
remotely interact with the SPARK system. This subsystem Fig. 2. Subsystem Level Interaction
consists of 2 modules which mainly run on the clientele
devices. They are
1) Client Application: This mainly runs as a background module and check the availability of vacant lots. Depending on
process which processes the inputs given by the user through the status the user would be intimated with the confirmation
the parking reservation GUI and sends the information to the message through the GSM/GPRS interface. The management
parking management subsystem. station will also send the status information to the WSN,
2) Parking Reservation GUI: Parking reservation GUI is a guidance and entrance display subsystem to update the parking
front-end application running on the clientele devices allowing status.
the users to give their parking details (License Number + Time
V. P ROTOTYPE S YSTEM
of parking) in order to reserve a parking lot. This information
is later processed by client application and sent to the parking We have implemented a prototype model of the system and
management subsystem to allocate a parking lot. conducted preliminary experiments. In this section we present
our experimental setup as part of this project.
IV. S UBSYSTEM I NTERACTIONS
A. Sensing Technique
The WSN subsystem as depicted in figure 2 senses the status
As part of the prototype model we have used low cost
(occupied/vacant) of parking space and transmits messages
light sensors of MTS310 [15] sensor board attached to the
through RF communication unit to the sink subsystem and
MicaZ [16] motes for sensing and event detection. To detect
changes the display status. The sink subsystem processes the
an event we evaluate (Baselight − Sn ) > Threshold, where
messages received from the WSN subsystem and sends the
Baselight is calculated through reference motes deployed in
processed data to the management subsystem through Se-
the parking lot. This value will eliminate the disparity in light
rial/USB/Ethernet interface. This information is inturn stored
readings due to environmental variations. Sn is the averaged
in the database module of the management subsystem. The
light readings for a predefined period of time (1 second in our
received information is processed and the status message is
case). If the difference in readings exceed the set threshold,
sent to the guidance and entrance display subsystem through
then we assume that the lot is occupied with a car, else, we
wireless (WiFi/Bluetooth/RF) interfaces so as to change the
consider that the lot is vacant.
display status.
Whenever the user needs to reserve a parking lot, he will \if((absdiff_u16(BaseLight,
submit the details through the client subsystem which is S_n))>Threshold){
further processed and forwarded to the management subsystem countPE++;
through the GSM/GPRS interface. Management subsystem if(countPE == MAX_EVENTS){
will inturn query the status of parking lot from the database countPE=0;

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 (a) Sensor Node (b) Sink Node
(a) Parking Layout (b) Management Server

Fig. 4. SPARK Prototype Model

as in figure 3(b). In this prototype model we use MIB520 [8] as

a gateway between WSN subsystem and parking management
subsystem. These gateway nodes with adequate power collects
(c) Guiding Node (d) Entrance Display
information from the sensor network and forwards it to the
parking management subsystem.
3) Guiding Node: TelosB motes [8], Nokia 3310 LCD
display [14] and an LCD-TelosB panel interface board were
used as part of the guiding node as depicted in figure 3(c).
This setup was placed at each turn off of the parking area.
These guiding nodes were able to get real time guiding
(e) Status LED Display (f) GSM Device information from the management subsystem and display the
Fig. 3. Device Specifications
status information on the LCD screen. These nodes will
provide information to the user about the number of vacant
places in each direction (Left/Right/Ahead) and directs the
countNE=0; users to idle parking spaces.
// Parking lot is 4) Entrance Display: This display as shown in figure 3(d)
// occupied by car exist at the entrance of the parking area. Here we used the
} same device as guiding node for providing entrance informa-
} tion to the users. These nodes provides real time information
else{ regarding the total number of parking lots, vacancy informa-
countNE++; tion etc. from the management subsystem.
if(countNE == MAX_EVENTS){ 5) Status LED Display: These LED displays as in figure
countNE=0; 3(e) are placed at each and every parking lot. They indicate the
countPE=0; status of parking lot. Red LED indicates that the parking lot is
//Parking lot is occupied, while the green LED indicates that the parking lot
//vacant is vacant. Any reservation of the car parking lot is indicated
} using the blue LED.
} 6) GSM Device: GSM modem [17] as in figure 3(f) is
connected to the parking management subsystem. This device
B. Device Specification provide users to remotely reserve parking lot through Short
1) Sensor Node: This is the lowest level of the system and Message Service (SMS).
is provided by autonomous sensor nodes as shown in figure
3(a). These small, battery-powered devices are placed in the C. Prototype System: Experimental Setup
areas of interest. Each sensor node collects environmental data The initial SPARK prototype system was deployed at our
primarily about its immediate surroundings. In the prototype Ubiquitous Computing Research Centre (UCRC) which in-
system we placed these nodes at every parking lot. These cludes 20 sensor nodes, 3 guiding nodes, entrance display,
nodes will sense the presence of car in the parking lot using sink and a management server with GSM module as shown
the light sensors attached and sends the event to the sink node in the figure 4.
through RF communication. The LEDs attached with the nodes Initially, when the system starts functioning, all sensor
also provide status information about the parking lots. nodes form a network autonomously. The sensor nodes check
2) Sink Node: Individual sensor nodes communicate and the availability of each parking space and transmit the status
coordinate with one another. The sensor nodes will typically report messages to the sink node. The sink node collects the
form a multihop network by forwarding each others messages, status messages and delivers them to the management server.
which vastly extends connectivity options. Ultimately, the data This information is stored in the database and will later be
from each sensor node are propagated to the gateway/sink node used by the management server to compute the vacant &

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occupied spaces. It further transmits the status information to
the guiding and parking entrance display.
When a car parks in a parking lot, the sensor node detects
that the parking space is occupied and sends a report message
to the sink node. It also turns on the red LED to indicate
the parking lot status as occupied. After receiving the report,
the sink node would notify the management server regarding
the change in the status. Consequently, the management server
would re-calculate the information and sends it to the proper
guiding and entrance display to change the display status.
Customers interested in reserving the parking lot could send
a message through the client reservation GUI. The message
would consist of the license number of the car, time of
parking and duration for which the user wants to park. This
message will be processed by the reservation module running
on the management server. The user will then receive an
acknowledgment with the confirmation and the expiry time
of their parking depending on the vacant lots in the parking
area. If parking area is completely occupied, the customer will
receive a message which shows Parking lots are full.

D. System Evaluation
The SPARK prototype system is developed as a proof of
concept to meet the real time requirements of parking man-
agement systems. We have carried out preliminary experiments
Fig. 5. Scenario-1: Vacant Parking Lots
to evaluate the functionalities and features provided by our
prototype system. In our initial experiment we have modeled
this prototype for 20 parking lots.
1) Parking Monitoring:
a) Scenario 1: Total parking lots are vacant: When
all the parking lots are vacant, the sensor nodes placed in
the parking lots detect that there is no event generated. The
entrance display shows total vacant lots as 20 and parking lot
GUI depicts the same as shown in figure 5.
b) Scenario 2: Three cars are parked: In this scenario we
experimented by parking three cars in the parking lots. The
sensor nodes detected the events and transmitted the report
message to the sink. The sink in turn forwarded these messages
to the management server. The management server processes
this information and sends the status report to the respective
guiding nodes and entrance display. The entrance display and
parking lot GUI then, displayed the total no of vacant lots as
17 (shown in figure 6).
2) Parking Reservation: The user interested in reserving
the parking lot would submit his parking details on the client
reservation GUI running on his mobile phone. This SMS
message is forwarded to the management server through the
GSM interface. In this case the management server finds
parking lot number 19 to be vacant and sends confirmation
message, allocated parking lot number and start time of
parking to the user. The management server will also send
the status information to the WSN subsystem which will turn
on the blue LED of parking lot 19 as shown in figure 7 and Fig. 6. Scenario-2: Parking lots with three cars
the parking lot GUI updates the parking lot number 19 as
reserved.

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Fig. 7. Reserved Parking Lot Display
Fig. 8. Parking Guidance
3) Parking Guidance: We depict the feature of parking
guidance provided by our prototype system in this case. The
parking guiding nodes are deployed at the turn offs of the
parking area. As shown in the figure 8 these nodes depict the
availability of parking lots in three directions (left/right/ahead).
VI. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we described the Smart PARKing (SPARK)
management system using wireless sensor networks. Based
on the requirement analysis for existing car parking manage-
ment systems, we designed the system architecture and its
subsystem level components as part of UCRC project. We
implemented a full fledged prototype model as a proof of
concept to realize and understand the real time scenarios in
parking management systems. Through our prototype system
we demonstrated that the proposed architecture can effectively
satisfy the requirements of a car park management system and
we believe that wireless sensor networks can be a promising
technology to solve future parking hassles.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We are grateful to Centre for Development of Advanced
Computing (C-DAC) for encouraging our efforts in pursuing
R&D in the areas of Ubiquitous Computing. This work was
funded by Department of Information Technology, Ministry
of Communications and Information Technology, Government
406
of India, under the project “Establishment of National Level
Ubiquitous Computing Research Resource Centres”.
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