With the advent of smart and green cities, the development of energy-efficient smart parking systems has attracted researchers to reduce environmental pollution in smart cities due to reducing traffic congestion as well as waste of time and fuel consumption. This article investigates how to integrate the Internet of Spatial Things (IoST) with workload balancing and image processing in fog computing to build an energy-efficient smart parking system. The suggested system applies Q-Learning, a reinforcement learning method, to achieve workload balancing and then deploys image processing to detect vacant parking slots. The proposed method’s main objective of load balancing is to reduce energy consumption. The evaluation of the proposed system is done by comparing two case studies, fog-based and cloud-based IoST implementations, in the iFogSim simulator for various scenarios and scales. Moreover, it evaluates and compares the energy consumption of various devices. Experimental findings show that the devised system in fog-based IoST greatly reduces energy consumption with improves parking space availability in smart parking in contrast to the cloud-based deployment of smart car parking.
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