Whitepapers

1 Introduction The Government of India has started the Smart City Mission as an urban renewal and retrofitting program to develop 100 cities across India leveraging cutting edge technology which will create a more scalable and sustainable environment for an ever-growing population. This initiative will bring forward many advancements to cities to include smart infrastructure, smart governance, smart utilities, and smart citizens. This white paper makes an effort to demonstrate how smart technologies based on LoRaWAN, can solve critical problems typical to India and also contribute to the overall Smart Cities Mission leveraging creative analytics, cloud-based data processing, and cost-effective infrastructure and solutions. 2 Audience The audience for this whitepaper is Smart City decision makers, Community Leaders, System Integrators, Service and Solution Providers, Enterprises, and others intending to contribute to India's Smart Cities Mission by leveraging Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technology. This whitepaper will describe the technical capabilities of LPWAN technologies with focus on the LoRaWAN™ protocol and how it has successfully been deployed in a live Proof of Concept (PoC) using Smart Parking Sensors to reduce illegal parking and improve traffic congestion for one of India's Smart Cities. 3 India's Illegal Parking Challenges Alongside a rapid growth in population, India is seeing a steady rise in income of an average middle-class household. This rapid growth, coupled with cultural shifts such as small nuclear families, dual income households etc. has led to a rapid increase in density of motor vehicles per household. This is putting an additional strain on the existing parking infrastructure of the already over-congested cities. As a natural alternative, most car owners, in the absence of parking spots, choose to park on temporary spots such as road side. Often these parking spots are marked illegal by the city authorities. It is estimated that on any working day, over 40% of the urban road area is taken up by parked cars. Several cities including Delhi, Chandigarh and Pune have taken steps towards framing a parking policy to reduce parking pressure and congestion on roads and public spaces. The efforts however, fail to balance the supply of parking spaces with efforts to reduce the overall demand for parking. There are several problems with these conventional parking policies: 1. There is an unsustainable pressure on the available land for a wasteful use. 2. Minimal pricing for street parking irrespective of the demand 3. Illegal encroachment of public spaces and walkways 4. Restricted access for emergency services in congested areas Even the planned smart parking management solutions have not been found to yield expected results due to choosing sub-optimal technologies. The parking sensors themselves are sometimes based on localized wireless area networks which suffer from low battery life and high maintenance costs. Instead of collecting and storing the occupancy and traffic data from these sensors and using them for advanced analytics, the data is merely displayed on an LED panel to determine vacant and occupied status. Features like parking reservation and route planning according to nearest available parking spots are not available in a centralized fashion. 3

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