A Reservation-based Smart Parking System

Finding a parking space in most metropolitan areas, especially during the rush hours, is difficult for drivers. The difficulty arises from not knowing where the available spaces may be at that time; even if known, many vehicles may pursue very limited parking spaces to cause serious traffic congestion. In this paper, we design and implement a prototype of Reservation-based Smart Parking System (RSPS) that allows drivers to effectively find and reserve the vacant parking spaces. By periodically learning the parking status from the sensor networks deployed in parking lots, the reservation service is affected by the change of physical parking status. The drivers are allowed to access this cyber-physical system with their personal communication devices. Furthermore, we study state-of-the-art parking policies in smart parking systems and compare their performance. The experiment results show that the proposed reservation-based parking policy has the potential to simplify the operations of parking systems, as well as alleviate traffic congestion caused by parking searching.