Smart Parking System (SPS) using Internet of Things (IoT)

Internet of Things (IOT) plays a vital role in connecting the surrounding environmental things to the network and made easy to access those un-internet things from any remote location. It’s inevitable for the people to update with the growing technology. And generally people are facing problems on parking vehicles in parking slots in a city. In this project we design a Smart Parking System (SPS) which enables the user to find the nearest parking area and gives availability of parking slots in that respective parking area. And it mainly focus on reducing the time in finding the parking lots and also it avoids the unnecessary travelling through filled parking lots in a parking area. Thus it reduces the fuel consumption which in turn reduces carbon footprints in an atmosphere.

Our system is derived from the idea of IoT. The system uses the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consisting of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to monitor car parks. An RFID reader counts the percentage of free parking spaces in each car park. The use of RFID facilitates implementation of a large-scale system at low cost. The system will update the status from the WSN node (the status of car park spaces) when a new car joins in the system. Therefore, the status of the overall parking system is always updated in real time.

• Cloud-Based Server: This is a Web entity that store the resource information provided by local units located at each car park. The system allows a driver to search and find information on parking spaces from each car park without the need to directly access the local server node by directly accessing the cloud-based server.

• Local Unit: This unit is located in each car park and stores the information of each parking space, as shown. The local unit includes the following:

• Control Unit: This is an Arduino Uno module, which is connected using an RFID reader (MFRC522). The card reader authenticates the user information and then displays this information on the screen. If the information of the RFID tag or card is correct, the Arduino module will control the opening of the door for the vehicle to enter. The Arduino module connects with the cloud server using WiFi Module-ESP8266 through an Internet connection to transfer data from the local car park to the cloud server database.

• Screen: This displays information on the capacity of the local car park, the total current percentage of free spaces, the status of the RFID tag check, the user card when entering, and a mini map of the local car park.

• RFID Tag or ID Card: This is used to check and authenticate user information and calculate the percentage of total free spaces in each car park.

• Software Client: This is a web application system build on Laravel. The users will simply open a browser and browse the website to check whether the parking lots are vacant or not. The users access the system via internet connections.