Wireless Ad Hoc Discovery of Parking Meters

Locating a suitable parking spot is a common challenge faced by millions of citydwellers every day. As common is the revenue generation by fee and fine collection in these municipalities. Wireless ad hoc networking technologies offer a new and efficient means to both simplify the process of parking and find collection as well as extending the convenience for drivers. In this paper we describe a multi-hop wireless parking meter network (PMNET) that, when coupled with a GPS receiver, allows a user (driver) to quickly locate and navigate to an available parking space. Our solution is achieved by equipping existing parking meters with wireless radio frequency (RF) transceivers and auxiliary hardware and software. We believe that this is a compelling application that applies wireless ad hoc networking and lowpower, short range RF technologies. The attractiveness of the proposal stems from the fact that such a network of nodes can function without any fixed wired or wireless infrastructure such as cellular or satellite networks. In this work, we model a PMNET as a special class of ad hoc networks characterized by a combination of static, immobile nodes (parking meters) and mobile nodes (vehicles). We propose scalable techniques for satisfying a mobile user’s query in a distributed fashion. Proc. MobiSys 2004 Workshop on Applications of Mobile Embedded Systems (WAMES 2004), Boston, MA, USA, June 2004. This work is supported by the NSF under grant No. ANI-0073843. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.