A Practical Evaluation of a Secure and Energy-Efficient Smart Parking System Using the MQTT Protocol

The smart parking system is a major component of the smart city concept, especially in the age of the Internet of Things (IoT). It attempts to take the stress out of finding a free parking space in crowded places, mostly during peak times. This paper focuses on implementing a secure smart parking solution based on the publish-subscribe communication model for exchanging a huge volume of data with a large number of clients while minimizing the power consumption. The Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) was adopted in this paper as a promising substitution to traditional public key cryptography such as Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA). The implemented system provides several functional services including parking vacancy detection, real-time information for drivers about parking availability, driver guidance, and parking reservation. Moreover, it provides security mechanisms for both network and application layers. Performance and power consumption experiments using a testbed show the efficiency and practicality of the implemented system, essentially with the IoT resource-constrained devices. Our findings demonstrate achieving energy consumption reductions of up to 54% and a CPU usage decrease of up to 55% compared to the existing solutions.