Abstract
Background: The abundant use of personal vehicles has raised the challenge of parking the vehicle in crowded places such as shopping malls. To help the driver with efficient and troublefree parking, a smart and innovative parking assistance system is required. In addition to discussing the basics of smart parking, Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud computing, and Fog computing, this chapter proposes an IoT-based smart parking system for shopping malls.
Methods: To process the IoT data, a hybrid Fog architecture is adopted in order to reduce the latency, where the Fog nodes are connected across the hierarchy. The advantages of this auxiliary connection are discussed critically by comparing with other Fog architectures (hierarchical and P2P). An algorithm is defined to support the proposed architecture and is implemented on two real- world use-cases having requirements of identifying the nearest free car parking slot. The implementation is simulated for a single mall scenario as well as for a campus with multiple malls with parking areas spread across them.
Results: The simulation results have proved that our proposed architecture shows lower latency as compared to the traditional smart parking systems that use Cloud architecture.
Conclusion: The hybrid Fog architecture minimizes communication latency significantly. Hence, the proposed architecture can suitably be applied for other IoT-based real-time applications.
Keywords: Cloud computing, fog computing, inter-fog communication, IoT, fog architecture, latency, smart building, smart city, mall parking, smart parking.
Graphical Abstract