International conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud)
(I-SMAC 2017)
Cloud Connected Smart Car Park
Shyam Ravishankar
B. E. Electronics and Communication Engineering
Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering
Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, India
levioliniste24@gmail.com
Abstract-As vehicular traffic increases, the lack of smart
parking zones further causes problems like fuel wastage
and traffic congestion. The Internet of Things has already
been used to provide Smart car parking solutions. Howev-
er, these solutions have the drawback of not being scalable
or accessible at all times.. Also, the reservation models
that have also been suggested are not always practically
implementable. This paper proposes a solution which is
cost effective, scalable and robust to indicate the number
of free parking slots in a given parking area. This is im-
plemented using infrared sensors in every bay which are
then connected to a Raspberry Pi. The raspberry Pi trans-
fers all the data to a cloud server, which is accessible to
users using a mobile application.
Keywords-Internet of Things, Raspberry Pi, Cloud
Services, Mobile Application
I. INTRODUCTION
Car sales have hit a record high in India with over
2 million vehicles having been sold in the year 2015
alone, with an 8% increase in sales in the financial
year 2015-16 from the previous year. This increase in
the number of cars means an increase in the necessary
parking space. In present day office buildings, people
need to search each parking bay in turn leading to a
waste of time and fuel. The need for intelligent park-
ing technology has already been highlighted [1] [2].
A few smart parking solutions already exist. One
solution uses Short Messaging Services, USSD
which is dependent on signal availability [3]. Howev-
er, mobile network may not also be available in multi
storey buildings. Another uses a reservation system
[4]. While it may enhance productivity, it also has the
drawback that slots must be reserved well in advance.
A few solutions using video sensors have been pro-
posed, but these are expensive [5]. Other solutions
lack in ease of access [6] or fault tolerance [7].
978-1-5090-3243-3/17/$31.00 2017 IEEE
Nrithya Theetharappan
B.E Electronics and Communication engineering
Easwari Engineering College
Ramapuram,Chennai,India.
nrithya17@gmail.com
The solution proposed here utilizes the Internet of
Things. It may be defined as connecting things pre-
sent in the physical world with sensors and then con-
necting them to a network through wired or wireless
means[8] [9]. The various issues faced in wireless
applications are outlined [10]
The solution proposed in this paper utilizes the ar-
chitecture of the cloud server is in a way that an un-
restricted number of slots may be added without any
change in the code. The associated mobile application
can run on Windows, Android and iOS. Moreover, the
code can be recycled for multiple boards making the
proposed solution cost effective, scalable and versa-
tile.
II. ARCHITECTURE
The block diagram gives the architecture of the
proposed solution. It consists of the following parts
A.Sensors
The Infra Red photoelectric reflective module, with
a range of 0.02 to 0.4 meters was used. It requires 5
Volts and less than 2mA of current The required pow-
er is provided by the raspberry pi board.The output
goes low in the presence of an obstacle.
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 International conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud)
B.Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry has the following collections: a power
source, an Ethernet cable and to 12 sensors. A voltage
divider network is used to connect the sensors to the
GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi as they give an output
of 5V but the raspberry pi accepts inputs of 3.3V. The
device is registered using WebAPI to be recognized
as a part of the network. The sensor number, the pins
for trig and echo and slot and level of the placed sen-
sor. Are you to check for the presence of a car and the
service bus function to is called to update the details.
This is enabled by checking the distance of the object
in the slot from the sensor.
C. Data Storage
Azure Service Bus. is a temporary queue for data
ingestion. It is used to send the data from the raspber-
ry pi to the queue.The Blob on Azure. Is used to store
unprocessed, raw data. The processed data from the
Web jobs and Web APIs is stored on the Azure SQL
Database
D. Data Processing
The function of the Web job is to send the Queued
data from the Azure Service
978-1-5090-3243-3/17/$31.00 2017 IEEE
(I-SMAC 2017)
Bus to the SQL Server. Two Web APIsare used: one
for Device Registration and Error Management and
the other for handling parking data. The first syn-
chronizes with the Raspberry Pi to register the Pi and
the sensors in the correct level or zone of the Parking
Area. The next acts as a medium between the SQL
Server and the Mobile Application
E. Admin Portal
The company or the parking area manager can access
this data through the Admin Portal. This Portal also
has the provision to indicate faulty sensors along with
the usual data analytics.
F. Mobile Application
The mobile application for the users is developed
using Apache Cordova Tools on Microsoft Visual
Studio 2015 [11]. Angular javascript was used so that
the application may be ported across Android, Win-
dows and IOS platforms. An additional feature is the
Text to Speech module which ensures that the users
do not have to look at their phones while driving. It
reads out the number of empty parking bays in the
users preselected preferred parking level or zone.
The application has an error reporting facility which
may lead to the recognition of faulty sensors..
G. Data Analytics
Application insights are used to help understand the
performance and usage of the web application [12]. It
gives an idea about preferred zones and levels. This
is also useful to identify the pattern in which zones
and levels get filled up with respect to time. This may
aid in organizing personnel and necessary renovation.
III.ALGORITHM
1. Import the necessary libraries
2. Send data to service bus using shared access
key name and value
3. Keep running till data is successfully sent
4. Input sensor number,pins for IR input and slot
and level of placed sensor
5. Check for the presence of cars and call the ser-
vice bus to update the details
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 International conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud)
(I-SMAC 2017)

978-1-5090-3243-3/17/$31.00 2017 IEEE 73

 International conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud)
(I-SMAC 2017)

III.CONCLUSION
An Iot based smart parking solution has been described
in this paper. S the world moves towards smart cit-
ies, such a parking solution is the need of the hour.
The easy to use mobile application makes it more
efficient for end user access. It is also scalable and
cost-effective.
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