Real-time Urban Parking Space Management using Fog Computing

The rise in the number of private automobiles, especially in populated zones leads to many issues like traffic congestion, waste of time and fuel as they spend more time finding a parking spot. Vehicles release toxic gases, as they are ideal in traffic thus the number of pollutants gets increased. Smart parking systems help with these problems. They reduce traffic congestion which leads to less environmental pollution and saves fuel. A cloud-based parking system has been proposed, but it requires high latency and high bandwidth. Fog Computing gives us a better solution than cloud computing. With the help of fog computing smart car parking systems, the proposed model can clear all these issues. The driver gets information about the parking spots with minimal latency and energy consumption. By guiding the drivers where the parking spot is free it uses the space optimally. It also reduces the need to expand the parking area since land acquisition in urban areas is tough. A latency-reducing approach was developed using iFogSim and metrics like latency, total energy consumed, and total time taken were considered for a comparative analysis between the fog environment and the cloud environment. The developed fog-based system demonstrated better results than the cloud-based approach.