Smart Parking System Using IoT Sensors

Abstract

Due to the increasing difficulty of finding vacant parking slots in urban cities, Smart Parking System has been developed to solve the problem. It is a system that can show the status of all parking slots in an area which allows drivers to find parking easily. The objective of this paper is to design a Smart Parking System by using Internet of things (IoT) sensors and evaluate the system’s performance. In this paper, ultrasonic sensors will be used as the IoT sensors while the microcontroller of the system is the NodeMCU ESP8266. The ultrasonic sensors will be placed in each parking slot to detect the presence of a vehicle. When the sensor detects a car, it will send this information to the microcontroller and the microcontroller will update the parking data stored in the cloud server via an internet connection. The users can then access the parking information in the cloud with their mobile devices by scanning the Quick Response (QR) code provided or directly visiting the cloud online. In addition, unique designs are proposed to solve some common problems faced by the parking systems such as the ultrasonic sensor might be malfunctioning and the sensor is unable to differentiate between a vehicle and a pedestrian. The performance of the system will then be evaluated based on its accuracy. From the results obtained, the system prototype achieved an accuracy of 100 %. Comparing this system with other Smart Parking Systems proposed, it proves that this method has higher cost-efficiency and reliability. This shows the significance of this research since higher system reliability and cost-efficiency can increase the confidence of the parking area owners to implement this Smart Parking System which can save the driver’s time and reduce air pollution.