Considering the increase of urban population and traffic congestion, smart parking is always a strategic issue to work on, not only in the research field, but also from economic interests. Thanks to information and communication technology evolution, drivers can more efficiently find satisfying parking spaces with smart parking services. The existing and ongoing works on smart parking are complicated and transdisciplinary. While deploying a smart parking system, cities, as well as urban engineers, need to spend a very long time to survey and inspect all the possibilities. Moreover, many varied works involve multiple disciplines, which are closely linked and inseparable. To give a clear overview, we introduce a smart parking ecosystem and propose a comprehensive and thoughtful classification by identifying their functionalities and problematic focuses. We go through the literature over the period of 2000–2016 on parking solutions as they were applied to smart parking development and evolution, and propose three macro-themes: information collection, system deployment, and service dissemination. In each macro-theme, we explain and synthesize the main methodologies used in the existing works and summarize their common goals and visions to solve current parking difficulties. Finally, we give our engineering insights and show some challenges and open issues. Our survey gives an exhaustive study and a prospect in a multidisciplinary approach. Besides, the main findings of the current state-of-the-art throw out recommendations for future research on smart cities and the Internet architecture.

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A Survey of Smart Parking Solutions

The growing size of cities and increasing population mobility have determined a rapid increase in the number of vehicles on the roads, which has resulted in many challenges for road traffic management authorities in relation to traffic congestion, accidents, and air pollution. Over the recent years, researchers from both industry and academia have been focusing their efforts on exploiting the advances in sensing, communication, and dynamic adaptive technologies to make the existing road traffic management systems (TMSs) more efficient to cope with the aforementioned issues in future smart cities. However, these efforts are still insufficient to build a reliable and secure TMS that can handle the foreseeable rise of population and vehicles in smart cities. In this survey, we present an up-to-date review of the different technologies used in the different phases involved in a TMS and discuss the potential use of smart cars and social media to enable fast and more accurate traffic congestion detection and mitigation. We also provide a thorough study of the security threats that may jeopardize the efficiency of the TMS and endanger drivers' lives. Furthermore, the most significant and recent European and worldwide projects dealing with traffic congestion issues are briefly discussed to highlight their contribution to the advancement of smart transportation. Finally, we discuss some open challenges and present our own vision to develop robust TMSs for future smart cities.

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A Communications-Oriented Perspective on Traffic Management Systems for Smart Cities: Challenges and Innovative Approaches

A systematic review on routing protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Smart parking in IoT-enabled cities: A survey

Given the escalating population across the globe, it has become paramount to construct smart cities, aiming for improving the management of urban flows relying on efficient information and communication technologies (ICT). Vehicular sensing networks (VSNs) play a critical role in maintaining the efficient operation of smart cities. Naturally, there are numerous challenges to be solved before the wide-spread introduction of VSNs, including the conception of an accurate topological analysis method and a beneficial cooperation mechanism during the process of city-wide information sharing. Hence, in this article, we construct a VSN-aided smart city model and appraise a range of intelligent applications in terms of both public services and urban flow management. Then, the information source selection algorithm of a complex network and a reinforcement learning based city information sharing mechanism are considered, complemented by a range of open challenges.

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Vehicular Sensing Networks in a Smart City: Principles, Technologies and Applications

By exchanging events in a vehicular ad hoc network, drivers can receive interesting information while driving. For example, they can be informed of available parking spaces in their vicinity. Obviously, a suitable protocol is needed to disseminate the events efficiently within the area where they are relevant. Moreover, in such a competitive context where each vehicle may be interested in the resource, it is crucial not to broadcast that resource to each driver in the vicinity. Otherwise, those drivers would waste time trying to reach a parking space and only one of them would be satisfied, which would lead to a poor satisfaction in the system.To solve this problem, we detail in this paper a reservation protocol that efficiently allocates parking spaces in vehicular ad hoc networks and avoids the competition among the vehicles. We have integrated our protocol within VESPA, a system designed for vehicles to share information in VANETs.

A cooperative reservation protocol for parking spaces in vehicular ad hoc networks

This paper focuses on intelligent transportation systems and, more precisely, on intervehicle ad hoc networks. A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a highly dynamic network as the vehicles communicate using short-range wireless communications and can move very quickly. Thus, for example, we can only rely on short interactions between vehicles to exchange information about relevant events. In this paper, we describe in detail a dissemination protocol that vehicles can use to share information by using vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The dissemination approach considers the relevance of the data, represented by what we call encounter probability, to decide when a rediffusion is needed. The protocol is able to disseminate data about any type of event in the network (e.g., available parking spaces, accidents or obstacles in the road, information about moving objects such as emergency vehicles that should get the right of way, etc.) by setting appropriate weights for the different factors that affect the computation of the encounter probability. An extensive experimental evaluation with different types of events shows the interest of the proposal: The vehicles receive the relevant messages in time, and the network overload is limited.

A Content-Based Dissemination Protocol for VANETs: Exploiting the Encounter Probability

By exchanging events in a vehicular ad hoc network VANET, drivers can receive interesting information while driving. For example, they can be informed of available parking spaces in their vicinity. A suitable protocol is needed to disseminate the events efficiently within the area where they are relevant. Moreover, in such a competitive context where each vehicle may be interested in a resource, it is crucial not to communicate that resource to each driver in the vicinity. Otherwise, those drivers would waste time trying to reach a parking space and only one of them would be fulfilled, which would lead to a poor satisfaction in the system. To solve this problem, we detail in this paper a reservation protocol that efficiently allocates parking spaces in vehicular ad hoc networks and avoids the competition among the vehicles. We have integrated our protocol within VESPA, a system that we have designed for vehicles to share information in VANETs. An experimental evaluation is provided, which proves the usefulness and benefits of our reservation protocol in both parking lots and urban scenarios. Besides, we present an in-depth study of the state of the art on this topic, that shows the interest and the originality of our approach.

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Sharing with caution: Managing parking spaces in vehicular networks

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), different types of information can be useful to drivers. Such networks are highly dynamic due to both the movements of the vehicles and the short range of the wireless communications. Thus, the information exchanges between vehicles about relevant information can only rely on short interactions. Therefore, an efficient mechanism to manage and disseminate the relevant information is required. Specifically, we present in this paper a system for data sharing in vehicular networks, which we call Vehicular Event Sharing with a mobile Peer-to-peer Architecture (VESPA). In this system, a new technique based on the concept of Encounter Probability is proposed for vehicles to share information using vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The objective is to facilitate the dissemination of information between vehicles when they meet each other, taking into account the relevance of the data to the drivers. Besides, the relevance must also be considered to inform a driver about the interesting events. Moreover, our proposal takes into account any type of event (e.g., available parking spaces, obstacles in the road, information relative to the coordination of vehicles in emergency situations, etc.) in the network. An experimental evaluation and the implemented prototype show the interest of the system.

Vehicular event sharing with a mobile peer-to-peer architecture

This paper focuses on intelligent transportation systems and more precisely on inter-vehicle ad hoc networks. Such networks are highly dynamic due to the movements of the vehicles and the short range of the wireless communications. Thus, for example, we can only rely on short interactions between the vehicles to exchange data about relevant events. We propose a new dissemination technique for vehicles to share information using V2V communications. Our goal is to make possible the exchange of information between vehicles when they encounter each other, taking into account the relevance of the data to the drivers. The originality of our proposal is that it relies on an encounter probability to disseminate data about any type of event (e.g., available parking spaces, obstacles in the road, information relative to the coordination of vehicles in emergency situations, etc.) in the network.

Nicolas Cenerario

Papers

A cooperative reservation protocol for parking spaces in vehicular ad hoc networks

A Content-Based Dissemination Protocol for VANETs: Exploiting the Encounter Probability

Sharing with caution: Managing parking spaces in vehicular networks

Vehicular event sharing with a mobile peer-to-peer architecture

Dissemination of information in inter-vehicle ad hoc networks