Whitepapers

4 Introduction to Smart Parking Solution Smart Parking Solutions across the world aim to leverage smart IoT technologies to manage city's organized and unorganized car parking lots in an efficient manner. The solution is based on camera based sensors and/or surface mount sensors for on-street parking and off-street parking slots. Parking Sensor are primarily used to detect the occupancy of the parking bay and communicate back the parking occupancy status to the local processing system/controller. LED display units are used for communicating the occupancy status and other relevant information at the parking entry/exit gates. In addition, entry/exits are coordinated using an arrangement of boom barriers, ticket dispensers and PoS machines to collect payments. Although cities in India have made efforts towards such smart parking management systems, an overwhelming majority of cities still suffer from unorganized and illegal car parking due to a lack of enforcement methods and effective selection of sensor and communication technologies. 5 Leveraging Smart Things In recent years, the "Internet of Things" (IoT) has come to the fore front of discussion as an innovative and sustainable approach in addressing Smart City initiatives such as smart parking. Many cities have begun leveraging "Smart Things" to transform their way of thinking and living in a smarter and more digital way. Smart Things are typically comprised of sensors, devices, gateways, and other intelligent hardware which have the ability to send information in a smart way to a system where processing of the data takes place. Most of the time these Smart Things send their data wirelessly to the Internet or "Cloud" for processing. Although wireless solutions have existed for over 25 years in certain industries, the way data is sent, collected, stored, analyzed, and then viewed has evolved over time and has been one of the main driving factors of today's Smart Things. One key area which cities have begun to focus on in order to support the data sent from these Smart Things is the communication infrastructure and the associated technologies which provide the means to communicate this ever so important data. 6 Low-Power Wide-Area Networks To address the communication infrastructure element, several wireless technologies were analyzed to determine which provided cities a low cost, long range, and low power consumption solution. It was decided that Low-Power Wide-Area Network solutions provided what was necessary to deploy city wide solutions with minimal impact on financial commitments, infrastructure, maintenance, and management of deployed solutions. LPWAN technology also was suited for solutions which only require devices to send small data over a wide area while maintaining battery life over many years. This made LPWAN more interesting in comparison to the other wireless network 4

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