Lifetime-Efficient Indoor Guidance for Smart Parking

Abstract

In an increasingly urbanized world, road transportation plays an important role in today's economy. To reduce congestion due to parking searches, the concept of smart parking was introduced. One of the essential and interesting features of smart parking is the guidance to a vacant spot. To do so, in such parking, each spot is generally equipped with an IoT sensor. These sensors form an IoT wireless sensor network (WSN). The battery lifetime remains one of the main limitations of such a network. Here, we propose an algorithm for indoor guidance to a vacant spot based on finding a battery level balance between the parking sensors. A comparison between five parking strategies including our proposal is presented. Although still under improvement, the results of the first simulations highlight two majors points. The first concerns the extension of the first sensor fall's point. The second regards the number of sensors' battery replacement. Indeed, starting with the same initial battery level, when using our proposal, every sensor will have the same number of battery replacement when the other strategies operate more replacement. The proposed lifetime-efficient guidance allows reducing significantly the number of interventions relating to the batteries replacement of IoT parking sensors and push back the fall of the first sensor so extend the parking overall lifetime.