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 cloudbased 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.

Introduction

Rapid advancements in the information and communication technology are urging people to move to urban areas, and consequently, the cities have become overpopulated. Due to the migration of a significant population to cities, the number of vehicles used for commuting daily has increased enormously [1]. Therefore, the parking spaces in large cities have shrunk due to the growing number of vehicles. In this situation, it has become challenging for the drivers to find the car parking slots in peak hours in populated cities. More vehicles pursuing the same parking space creates traffic congestion. Consequently, people spend a lot of time finding the place for parking, which results in wastage of time, added fuel consumption, and environmental pollution. The authors in [1] state that, according to an estimate finding the car parking space in Loss Angles costs around 730 tons of CO2, 95,000 hours, and 47,000 gallons of gasoline. The population of the world is rapidly urbanizing, and the increasing number of automobiles will add to the traffic congestion problem [2]. Parking problems have enticed more consideration in the last few years due to significant increase in the number of vehicles [3]. Considering the issues and accompanying problems in finding car parking spaces in large cities, several researchers have proposed smart car parking systems using cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT).