2016 13th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC)
M-Parking: Vehicle Parking Guidance System using
Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks
Sarang Deshpande
Samsung R&D Institute, Bangalore, India.
Email ID: uday.sarang@{samsung.com, gmail.com}
AbstractWith an expeditious increase in the vehicle transport
in the major cities, it has become more difficult to find the free
parking space to park the vehicles. Constant rise in the number of
vehicles on the roads has led to increase in the unwanted traffic,
drivers frustration, delay in the transportation and increase in
the noise and air pollution. Due to lack of proper knowledge of
parking space, it has become unable to utilize most of the nearby
parking space. This work proposes an innovative approach to
guide the vehicle drivers to the parking space using Hierarchical
Wireless Sensor Networks. A three sensors per parking slot based
technique is used to distinguish the type of parked vehicles
and to find the free parking slots in the parking area. Free,
partially-occupied and occupied parking slot states information
is stored at the Parking Server in the form of parking location
and the parking area layout with parking slot states marking on
it. Parking Server makes the parking information available to the
vehicle drivers by the mean of web and mobile applications for
guiding vehicles for parking. The results show that the parking
detection with multiple passive sensor nodes per parking slot
system is more energy efficient and vehicle parking detection is
as accurate as the single active sensor per parking slot system
in the existing parking designs.
Index TermsHierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks; Parking
Information Subscription; Vehicle Parking Guidance.
I. INTRODUCTION
In most of the major cities across the globe, the number
of vehicles has been increasing substantially in the recent
past years. With the increase in the transport vehicles, it has
become more difficult to find the free parking space to park
the vehicles. A large number of vehicles on the roads has led
to increase in the unwanted traffic, drivers frustration, delay in
the transportation and increase in the noise and air pollution.
Though there are several parking areas available across the
cities, due to lack of the proper knowledge of parking space,
it is unable to utilize these parking space. As per the existing
literature survey on the parking systems, there is no such
parking guidance system which could guide the vehicle drivers
to nearby parking space.
In this paper, an innovative approach for vehicle parking
guidance system utilizing an Hierarchical Wireless Sensor
Network has been proposed. Hierarchical Wireless Sensor
Networks (HWSNs) [1] are distributed embedded systems
composed of a large number of low-cost, low-power, multi-
functional autonomous sensor nodes. Each of the autonomous
sensor nodes consists of sensor(s), computing and communica-
tion elements. Once deployed in ad-hoc or planned manner, the
sensor network provides the ability to instrument, observe, and
978-1-4673-9292-1/16/$31.00 2016 IEEE
react to events and phenomena in the region of deployment.
HWSNs have a wide range of applications and can be broadly
classified into monitoring and object tracking applications.
Some of the HWSNs applications which are used in day-
to-day life are surveillance, health monitoring, home care, etc.
Proposed parking guidance system is composed of multiple
magnetic sensors nodes which detect the presence of the
vehicle in the parking space. This parking data is stored at
the Parking Server (PS) through intermediate nodes of the
HWSN. A service built on PS is used to deliver free parking
slots information based on the parking area and the parking
layout to the users through web based application and/or smart
mobile phone applications.
Rest of the paper is divided as follows. Section II gives a
quick glance on work done in the area of parking slot detection
systems. Section III discusses a) the technical challenges im-
plementing the vehicle parking guidance system, b) proposes
HWSN architecture for free parking slots detection, and c)
briefs on various ways of delivering parking information to
the vehicle drivers via web based or smart mobile phone
applications. Section IV discusses the results obtained from
proposed mechanism with respect to parking slot state detec-
tion accuracy and energy efficiency. Section V concludes the
paper.
II. RELATED WORK
Some of the closely related works for parking slot detection
systems using Wireless Sensor Networks have been discussed
in this section.
Authors in [2] used a Wireless Sensor Network with 3 axis
AMR sensors, sink node, gateway and server to detect the
presence of car or long vehicles. Multiple AMR sensors have
been put at certain height and the data is transmitted to the
sink node only when there is an abrupt variation is detected
at sensor node. The server node takes the responsibility
of computing whether the parking slot is occupied or not.
The paper talks about the number of parking slots that are
occupied/free but not the exact locations of those parking slots
in the parking area.
J. Chinrungrueng et. al. [3] proposed an Optical Wireless
Sensor Network to replace commonly used loop detectors for
counting the number of available parking space. The optical
sensor nodes have been put at the entry, exit and at some
key locations in the parking area to detect the type/size of the
vehicles.
 2016 13th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC)
The comparison is carried out between the sensor nodes that
can be used for smart parking management system [4]. An
analysis is conducted from a variety of sensors data ranging
from, acoustic, light, magnetic, etc. to detect whether a car
parking slot is vacant or occupied. This analysis is being used
for monitoring the large area for parking slots [5].
Yaser E. et. al. [6] proposed a visual display system using
Wireless Sensor Networks called as Parking Guidance System
(PGS). By conducting extensive simulations on several kinds
of cars, authors showed that the proposed Parking Guidance
System is self healing in any routing problems.
A Collaborative Wireless Sensor Network is defined [7] in
large parking area where the sensor nodes upon detecting the
presence of vehicle send their information to the sink node
with the multi-hop communications.
Our work proposes an innovative Vehicle Parking Guid-
ance System based on Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks
where the vehicle drivers get the information through web
based and/or smart mobile phone based applications. Every
parking slot is installed with three magnetic sensor nodes
to give the accurate information of the vehicles presence.
Assuming that with existing parking designs, any type of
vehicle (i.e. a motorcycle or a car) can be parked in a
given parking slot, the three sensor nodes per parking slot
technique helps identify the type of the parked vehicle. Based
on these three sensor nodes information, the parking slot state
is defined. The parking information is stored in the form of
parking location and the parking layout with parking slots
marked with their states at the Parking Server.
III. SYSTEM DESIGN
Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Network (HWSN) consists of
hundreds of sensor nodes which sense the environment phe-
nomenon, convert them into digital value and sends the value
to the base station through multi-level processing nodes. Sen-
sor node consists of batteries (2AA size) as a source of power,
sensor(s) connected to ADC (Analog to Digital Converter),
micro-controller to process the information, flash memory to
store the information and transceiver to communicate with
neighboring nodes/base station. A low power wireless com-
munication protocol called ZigBee (based on IEEE 802.15.4)
is used for communication between the nodes. Some of the
popular sensor nodes that are being used in research fields
and industries are Telosb, MicaZ, Imote, etc. This section
briefs about the technical challenges to build a parking system
based on above discussed HWSN using contending sensors,
discusses the proposed Vehicle Parking Guidance System and
how the parking information is disseminated to the vehicle
drivers for further guidance use.
A. Technical Challenges
HWSN is constrained by energy, bandwidth (256Kbps), sen-
sor range (15m), communication range (30m) and processing
power. Taking these constraints into consideration, an energy
efficient Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Network should be built
for vehicle parking guidance system.
Sensor Type Accuracy Energy Direction
Pressure Passive Medium Low Omni-directional
Seismic Passive Medium Low Omni-directional
Magnetic Passive High Low Omni-directional
Light Passive Medium Low Omni-directional
Ultrasonic Active High High Directional
Camera Passive High High Directional
TABLE I
C OMPARISON OF VARIOUS S ENSORS .
Table I shows the comparison between various sensor nodes
that can be used for parking slot state detection. Camera
sensors are substantial enough to be used as a free parking slots
monitoring. Use of them with WSN is not favorable, as every
camera sensor sends information in terms of pictures. Sending
a picture over a low bandwidth (256 Kbps-theoretical) is costly
in terms of energy usage. Additionally, operational cost of
camera sensors is higher than other available sensors. Due to
the above reasons the camera sensors should be omitted.
From Table I, it is clear that for higher accuracy per-
formance, one needs to choose an active sensor (a sensor
which transmits signal and receives it back) over a passive
sensor (a sensor which only receives the signal from the
target body/environment). Though active sensors give accurate
information, usage of these sensors are not energy efficient.
Consider a situation where, there is no parked vehicle that
has been landed in the parking slot from a long time but still
the active sensors will transmit the sensing signal to check if
any object is present around it. This continuous sensing signal
transmission will drain out their battery soon. There is a trade-
off between the active and passive sensor nodes with respect
to the accuracy of the detection of the object and the energy
they consume for performing monitoring tasks.
Existing types of vehicles leave the magnetic signature
behind, these magnetic signatures can be detected by the
magnetic sensor nodes. We have proposed a three magnetic
sensor nodes per parking slot based technique to detect the
vehicles presence accurately and to distinguish between the
parked vehicle types, e.g. a motorcycle and a car.
B. System Architecture
This work proposes a fully functional Hierarchical Wireless
Sensor Network to guide users to the free parking area. Figure
1 depicts the proposed Parking Guidance System architecture
where sensor nodes have been deployed in a planed manner.
The HWSN in a given parking area consists of multiple sensor
nodes, multiple sink nodes, one or more gateway nodes and
a Parking Server. In every parking slot with an approximate
area of 7ft. x 15ft., three numbers of sensor nodes have been
placed. These nodes are placed in such a way that they form
a triangle like structure with two parallel nodes at the front
side and one node at the rear side in the parking slot. These
sensor nodes periodically sense the parking slot to check if
any vehicle has been parked on it. If a vehicle is parked,
sensor nodes sense the magnetic signature disseminated by
the parked vehicle. If this sensed value is greater than the
predefined threshold (S ) and previously stored sensed
value, it sends sensor node state S being s occupied to
 2016 13th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC)

Fig. 1. Parking Guidance System using HWSN

one hop distant sink node. If the currently sensed value is the parking system. Based on the S , PS detects the parking
greater than S but less than previously stored sensed slot the sensor node belongs to. Using sensor nodes state
value, the sensor node does not send any state information information, PS runs an algorithm (Alg. 1) to find out if the
to the sink node. This way the sensor node minimizes the parking slot has been occupied or not and if it is occupied
the number of transmissions with the sink node. If the sensor then it distinguishes the type of vehicle it has in the parking
node reads a value less than S , sensor node compares slot. Based on computed information each parking slot in the
currently sensed value with previously stored value and if the parking layout is been updated with free, partially-occupied or
previously stored value is greater than currently sensed value, occupied state. In Figure 1, Parking SubArea 2 shows above
it transmits the S being s free state to its sink node. After discussed three parking states.
every sensing iteration, sensor node modifies its previously
stored value with the currently sensed value. C. Parking Information Delivery
Free parking slots information in various parking areas
A group of parking slots have been allocated a sink node
is updated at the Parking Server at regular interval. This
such that the information transfer from deployed sensor nodes
information is made available to the end users via two ways,
in the parking slot to the sink node happens in one hop
through 1) web hosted and 2) mobile phone applications.
communication. It has been seen from previous work [8]
Web hosted information can be utilized for analyzing parking
that multi-hop communication in Wireless Sensor Networks
related data, such as, percentage of vehicle occupancy in the
leads to data losses and less throughput. Every sensor node
parking area, type of vehicles parked, time period in which
in the parking slot either sends s free or s occupied state to
vehicles enter or exit most. Vehicle drivers install a client
the sink node. The sink nodes act as the relay node with
mobile application on their smart mobile phones and subscribe
receiver mode ON for all the time. Whenever a sink node
for the parking area services from the various parking locations
receives sensor nodes state change information from any of
supported by PS. Parking Server uses Push Technology to
its allocated sensor nodes, it relays this information to the
publish the parking information as and when the parking
gateway node. Sink node transmission duty cycle is kept high
content is updated.
(e.g. 5 secs) to minimize the energy consumption due to
Vehicle drivers are shown with the parking location and
excessive transmissions to the gateway node. Moreover, if the
layout at subscribed parking areas present in the city where
sink node does not receive sensor state change information
parking slot detection systems have already been installed.
from any of its registered sensor nodes, it does not transmit
Using geo-location (GPS, carrier N/W, etc.) information as an
any information to gateway node in that duty cycle.
input to the free parking slot detection system, vehicle drivers
Gateway node is connected to the PS with infra-structured are guided to the nearest free parking slot(s) available.
network by the means of wired or wireless (i.e. WiFi) medium.
Gateway node collects the sensor state information with sensor IV. RESULTS
ids (S ) from all the available sink nodes in the parking area Simulations were run for the proposed Vehicle Parking
and transfers it to the PS at regular intervals. PS node has Guidance System (VPGS) against Single Ultrasonic (active)
the information about the deployed HWSN and the layout of Sensor node per parking slot in Castalia Simulator which is
 2016 13th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC)

Alg. 1 Parking Lot State Detection Algorithm at Parking Server

1: Procedure GET PARKING L OT S TATE Parked Vehicle Detection Accuracy (Avg. data taken over 20 simulation runs)

2: If S1 = S2 = 120
VPGS Motorcycle detection
VPGS Car detection
S3 = Then 115 Ultrasonic sensor detection

Y coordinates (% in accuracy)
3: return 110
4: End If 105
5: If (S1 = S3 = )
100
(S2 = S3 = )
95
Then
6: return 90

7: End If 85
8: If S1 = S2 = 80
S3 = Then 5 10 15 20 25 30

9: return X coordinates (Number of vehicles parked)

10: End If (a) Parking vehicle detection accuracy in Vehicle Parking Guidance
System (VPGS) and Ultrasonic sensor nodes based Parking System
11: End Procedure
Energy Consumption of the Overall HWSN System

VPGS

Y coordinates (Energy consumption hW)

a framework based on OMNeT++ 4.1. A total of 90 nodes 14
Ultrasonic sensor node system
were deployed in an area of 100m x 150m (i.e. 300ft. x 500ft. 12
with 30 parking slots of dimension 7ft. x 15ft. each) area
10
with a group of 3 sensor nodes in each parking slot. Table
8
II shows the Magnetic Sensor Node Configuration used in the
simulation models. The simulations are run for the duration 6
of 5, 15 and 30mins respectively and the results are taken as 4
an average over 20 simulation iterations.
2

MCU TI MSP430 Mu 0
Sensor Magnetic 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
RF Transceiver CC1120 X coordinates (Simulation time in mins)
Transmission Protocol ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4) (b) Energy consumption comparison in Vehicle Parking Guidance
Data Rate 250 Kbps System (VPGS) and Ultrasonic sensor nodes based Parking System
Battery 2AA Size batteries
Indoor Communication Range 20-30 meter Fig. 2. Vehicle detection accuracy and energy consumption for VPGS based
on active and passive sensors

TABLE II
M AGNETIC S ENSOR N ODE C ONFIGURATION
Fig. 2 (a) shows that using three sensor nodes per parking
slot technique gives approximately similar parking vehicle
detection accuracy as that of one active sensor node system.
The parking vehicles entrance rate is varied from 2-15 vehicles
per five minuets to determine if any data loss happens at sink
node due to multiple sensor nodes sending their changed state.
It has been seen that for motorcycle, the detection was low
when entrance rate was made higher. Fig. 2 (b) shows that
the energy consumption with three passive sensor nodes per
parking slot technique outperforms the one active sensor node
per parking slot technique. Fig. 2 shows that an HWSN based
Vehicle Parking Guidance System is energy efficient compared
to traditionally used ultrasonic sensor nodes.
V. CONCLUSION
This paper has proposed a Vehicle Parking Guidance System
to guide vehicle drivers to nearest free parking area from
several parking areas across the city. Proposed Vehicle Parking
Guidance System can be extended to support additional fea-
tures, such as, pre-reservation of parking slots and on the fly
paying parking cost in various parking areas across the city.
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