Evaluation of a Lightweight IoT Protocol for Intelligent Parking Management in Urban Environments

This work presents the design and evaluation of a distributed IoT protocol for intelligent parking management. It exploits the communication protocol LoRa and is designed to operate fully autonomously, without requiring Internet connectivity, enabling real-time parking slot detection and allocation through long-range wireless communication. The protocol also includes an optional MQTT-based synchronisation layer to support data exchange between gateways and with a central collector, allowing for telemetry, system monitoring, and analytics. We performed a set of experiments, proving that the protocol holds system resilience and scalability, which are key aspects for deployment in urban environments with unreliable or limited network access. We also observed a significant reduction in parking search time while preserving acceptable levels of system latency. To complete our evaluation, we deployed, in our laboratory, a test-bed made by ESP32-based nodes and simulated gateway breakage and replacement, in order to prove the fault recovery capabilities of the entire network. Finally, we conducted a few empirical stress tests simulating high communication traffic and interactions, confirming acceptable effectiveness and stability for real urban contexts.