• We design a lightweight, stateless authentication and access-control framework for smart parking systems, combining elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for vehicle identity management with AES-GCM protected challenge–response and time-bounded JWT tokens, enabling secure, session-limited vehicle admission without blockchain or heavy infrastructure overhead. • We introduce a non-pricing, queue-balanced parking selection policy that dynamically steers vehicles across nearby parking lots using transparent operational signals travel time, relative occupancy, and route complexity effectively mitigating congestion and saturation while preserving user fairness and system simplicity. • We develop a modular, extensible system architecture suitable for real-time smart-city deployment, with explicitly configurable parameters and runtime measurement of cryptographic delays, allowing reproducibility, scalability, and seamless integration with traffic simulation platforms. • We implement and evaluate the proposed system in a SUMO TraCI environment, conducting large-scale experiments on the SRMAP scenario with 10,250 vehicle trips and explicit parking capacities, and demonstrate superior or competitive performance compared to DyPARK, PriParkRec, and PrivRep under identical experimental conditions. Smart parking in vehicular networks is an emerging technology that has been proposed to alleviate congestion in urban areas by employing intelligent systems, secure communication, and real-time decision-making. Smart parking systems enable vehicles to interact seamlessly with the infrastructure, thereby ensuring user convenience with minimal fuel consumption and waiting times. However, ensuring secure and privacy-preserving operation is a major challenge, and this is particularly true when dealing with threats such as unauthorized access and replay attacks. Various solutions such as blockchain-based smart parking systems and privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols have been proposed to overcome these challenges. However, these solutions are associated with high computational overhead and latency. In this paper, we propose an SLQ (Secure Lightweight and Queue Balanced)-based smart parking system that employs Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for lightweight key generation, Advanced Encryption Standard in Galois/Counter Mode (AES-GCM) for secure and authenticated encryption, and JSON Web Tokens for session validation. A challenge-response mechanism is employed to ensure the authenticity of the vehicle prior to accessing the parking facility, and replay protection strategies are also incorporated to prevent misuse of stale requests. We implement our framework using six candidate methods and compare our results against three well-known baselines (DyPARK, PriParkRec, and PrivRep) under identical Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) settings. Experimental results show that our SLQ-based parking method achieves SPEI = 0.837 and throughput = 811.170 veh/h, exceeding the nearest competitor, DyPARK (SPEI = 0.834, throughput = 809.870 veh/h), while reducing the registration delay from 0.596 ms to 0.240 ms (59.7% improvement).
Ankarboina et al. (Sun,) studied this question.