Implementation of a Smart Parking System for a University Campus

Abstract

In recent times, the amount of vehicle users is spreading rapidly requiring additional parking spaces. A university campus can be considered as a small city and it usually undergoes the same parking problems encountered by smart cities. Searching and getting a parking space has always been a concern in university campus or even in smart cities. This paper aims to present a smart parking system based on Internet of things (IoT) to eliminate the stress, frustration and the dissatisfaction of users and to help them spot an available parking space to station his/her vehicle in a university campus. When there is no available parking space in a parking area, certain users have the tendency to roam around in search of a parking space, thus wasting time and fuel. Hence, one possible solution is to create a mobile application, which shows a real-time status of each parking space in the parking area and takes into consideration users’ weekly time plan to allocate a parking space. Ultrasonic sensor and ESP8266 DevKitC microcontroller are used to implement the system. A real-time database records the status of each parking space. The system prototype is presented in the paper.