Towards a Fog Enabled Efficient Car Parking Architecture

The automotive industry is growing day by day and personal vehicles have become a significant transportation resource now. With the rise in private transportation vehicles, getting a free space for parking one’s car, especially in populated areas, has not only become difficult but also results in several issues, such as: (i) traffic congestion, (ii) wastage of time, (iii) environmental pollution, and most importantly (iv) unnecessary fuel consumption. On the other hand, car parking spaces in urban areas are not increasing at the same rate as the vehicles on roads. Therefore, smart car parking systems have become an essential need to address the issues mentioned above. Several researchers have attempted to automate the parking space allocation by utilizing state-of-the-art technologies. Significant work has been done in the domains of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Cloud Computing, Fog Computing, and Internet of Things (IoT) to facilitate the advancements in smart parking services. Few researchers have proposed methods for smart car parking using the cloud computing infrastructures. However, latency is a significant concern in cloud-based applications, including intelligent transportation and especially in smart car parking systems. Fog computing, bringing the cloud computing resources in proximate vicinity to the network edge, overcomes not only the latency issue but also provides significant improvements, such as on-demand scaling, resource mobility, and security. The primary motivation to employ fog computing in the proposed approach is to minimize the latency as well as network usage in the overall smart car parking system. For demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach for reducing the lag and network usage, simulations have been performed in iFogSim and the results have been compared with that of the cloud-based deployment of the smart car parking system. Experimental results exhibit that the proposed fog-based implementation of the efficient parking system minimizes latency significantly. It is also observed that the proposed fog-based implementation reduces the overall network usage in contrast to the cloud-based deployment of the smart car parking.