A Novel IoT-aware Smart Parking System

The development of Smart Cities is one of the main topics in the agenda of the European Commission and of several countries worldwide, aiming at creating an urban model that can guarantee a high quality of life for individuals and businesses alike. In this perspective, enabling a sustainable urban mobility is one of the most challenging goals, and the optimal management of parking areas represents a key aspect. As highlighted in [1], it is estimated that 30% of the daily traffic congestion in urban areas is caused by vehicles cruising for parking spaces, and that a driver spends on average 7.8 min to find a vacant parking spot. Furthermore, often drivers, frustrated by the lack of parking spaces, use the parking spots reserved for particular categories of people, such as disabled or law enforcement. This not only causes waste of time and fuel for drivers looking for parking but also increases air pollution and drivers’ frustration. The recent achievements in the Internet of Things (IoT) enabling technologies [2] open up opportunities to develop innovative smart parking systems, able to significantly reduce the traffic congestion and improve the citizens’ quality of life. Ultra High Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), Near Field Communication (NFC), and smart mobile represent some of the most promising candidates to face the urban mobility problem. Although originally designed with different objectives, in fact, RFID and WSN represent two complementary technologies whose physical integration might provide augmented functionalities and give new perspectives to a broad range of innovative applications [3]. Moreover, the adoption of widley recognized standards, such ad 6LoWPAN and CoAP, guarantees the development of extensible solutions, which can be easily integrated with the Smart City infrastructure.