Intelligent Indoor Parking

Nowadays positioning based navigation is an integrated part of our everyday’s routine. Hence, it is hard to succeed without a GPS based navigation system in a bigger city today. However, indoor positioning and navigation are still in their infancy, although these services would be desirable in many areas. One obvious application domain is vehicle navigation in a parking garage. The use of an indoor vehicle navigation system is convenient for the drivers, decreases the unnecessary circling in the garage and reduces air pollution. In this paper, we introduce our iParking indoor positioning and navigation system which has been under development. Our system monitors the occupancy of the parking lots, and with the aid of a Wi-Fi based background wireless infrastructure tracks the position of the vehicle entering the parking garage and navigates the driver to an appropriate free parking lot. Lot selection is handled at the entry point of the garage based on simple preferences, eg., the closest disabled parking space. The navigation interface is the driver’s smartphone. Currently, we have been implementing a prototype of our iParking system in a parking garage of a shopping mall for demonstration purposes. Keywords-iParking, Indoor positioning, Wi-Fi, Navigation, Android