A Smart Roadside Parking System Using Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons

Abstract

The management of roadside parking has been a big issue for metropolitan areas. Many city governments still rely on manual issuing of parking tickets or use parking meters to collect the parking fee. Either way, it is not economical in terms of the expenses on human labor and the efficiency of parking space management. To solve the problem, some researchers have proposed roadside parking systems based on wireless sensor networks. However, the existing approaches focus only on detecting the occupancy of parking spaces. This is not enough for a comprehensive roadside parking system because the identification of vehicles using specific roadside parking spaces is yet unknown. In this work-in-progress research, we propose a roadside parking system based on the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon technology to achieve the two goals simultaneously. Specifically, vehicles are attached with a BLE beacon device which broadcasts the identification of the registered vehicle to be scanned by the roadside units. By monitoring the estimated distances between the beacon device and a number of roadside units, our backend system is expected to determine the occupancy of the roadside parking spaces along with the identification of vehicles using the parking spaces.