Smart Parking System Based on mmWave Radars and Bluetooth Low Energy: Prototype Implementation

Abstract

Smart Parking has gained so much popularity in recent years due to the increasing number of vehicles in big cities, resulting in traffic congestion in urban areas. Not only on the streets but also in places such as educational institutions, hospitals, commercial activities, special events, and entertainment uses. Finding a free parking lot in these places has evolved difficulty for the drivers. To solve such a problem, governments and researchers tried to find alternative solutions to overcome or mitigate the traffic congestion. Many solutions have been proposed, such as increasing the parking capacities, which takes much time or makes it hard to find a square area in crowded places. Most existing studies, do not consider the cost of deployment, energy, and time-to-market consideration which makes the available systems need further investigation. In this paper, we propose an intelligent parking system prototype that can be useful for the drivers to have a prior knowledge about the available parking lots in the area of interest. Our proposed system involves deploying mmWave Radar sensor nodes in each parking lot to detect the availability of parking vehicle through transmitting radio pulses periodically. The detected information can be sent to the gateway through multi-hop for further statistics and reports. We also give an intensive analysis and study about the challenges and consideration on the mmWave radar design aiming to improve the detection accuracy and avoid false-detection that occurs from objects near to the sensor. To ensure continuous operation and extend sensor life-time, we propose Bluetooth Low Energy BLE-enabled relay-feature as the communication protocol between the nodes.