IoT-Enabled Vacant Parking Slot Detection System Using Inkjet-Printed RFID Tags
Lubna Lubna, Adnan Zahid, Naveed Mufti, Sadiq Ullah, Muhammad Waqas Nawaz, Abubakar Sharif, Muhammad Ali Imran, Qammer H. Abbasi
Abstract
It is challenging for motorists to manually search for a parking slot in a crowded parking area. Conventional methods for locating vacant or occupied space are regarded as inefficient and unreliable. In this work, an IoT-enabled vacant parking slot detection system is developed and tested using low-cost inkjet printed passive Ultra-High-Frequency (UHF) RFID tags. The working principle of the proposed system is to analyze the back-scattered signals strength from the tags at the receiver side for vehicle presence/absence detection in the parking slots. First of all, We propose a low-cost passive tag optimized to work in UHF RFID-band pasted on plastic material display for parking slots. The data collected by RFID reader from the tags is sent over Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol via Scotland 5G-network to MongoDB database using Python module Pymongo for decision making and display of vacant parking slots to the motorists. Python based web-app extracts data from the database and shows it on a web-app display using EJS for each slot. Experimental observations conducted at parking slots in the presence of vehicles indicate a drastic reduction in Received-Signal- Strength-Index (RSSI) value at the receiver end, which implies that RSSI signal drop can be utilized for the detection of vehicle presence in the parking slot. The suggested approach aims to facilitate the economical and effective location of available parking slots. The Test results for the proposed system are recorded and presented, demonstrating its significant performance and showing great accuracy for the tested scenarios.