An Environmental Energy Harvesting-Driven Wireless Parking Detection Method: Analysis and Implementation

Abstract

The Smart Parking System (SPS) has played an important role in solving the parking problem in urban areas recently, resulting in that the battery-powered Wireless Parking Detectors (WPDs) based on Internet of Things (IoT) technology have been widely used in SPS to collect basic data sets. However, the daily turnover rates of parking spaces are generally less than 10 vehicles in Shanghai, China, so that WPDs waste a lot of energy in collecting and processing of redundant sensor data when the parking space is occupied or free. Hence, an environmental Energy Harvesting-driven Parking Detection (EHPD) method, which includes a vehicle-induced vibration energy harvesting and conditioning circuit, as well as a parking detection algorithm based on the signatures of vehicle-induced seismic signals and wireless energy attenuated by vehicles, is proposed in the paper. In EHPD, the signatures of pulse signals converted from vehicle-induced seismic signals are used to drive the wireless energy features to participate in achieving parking detection. Finally, the proposed EHPD has been evaluated in a real testbed, and the experimental results show that it can achieve the same functions as the existing magnetometer-based WPD devices with lower cost and energy consumption.