## 6 Smart Parking
### Why Smart Parking? Drivers in cities with a high population density can encounter challenging problems when it comes to finding empty parking spots. It is common for drivers to look for parking spots in the street through ad hoc measures, luck, or experience. As the population and the number of vehicles grow, such parking search measures will not be efficient during emergencies. An alternative solution (Figure 18) to enhance the time efficiency and fuel usage would be a system that enables the drivers to know if there is an empty parking spot near the destination that can be reserve before their arrival. An automated system to control the parking usage and manage the parking spaces should be provided. A user display is a display panel in the parking lot that provides insights into the availability of parking. The client's desktop PC or mobile device communicates with the platform and displays the data to the parking controller. An automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) camera is a vehicle license plate recognition camera that together with the license plate recognition software should allow the automatic detection of license plates in real time. Ideally, an ANPR camera should be at a maximum distance of 25 m from the license plate. The optimal resolution is UHD/4K (3840 \(\times\) 2160), 2K (2560 \(\times\) 1440), or full HD (1920 \(\times\) 1080) for cameras closer than the maximum limit of 25 m. The current solutions in the market use modern image analysis algorithms and methods to enhance the sharpness, contrast, and illumination of the captured pictures. The newest ANPR cameras provide more than 99% scanning accuracy in any weather condition. The detected number plates are compared to a predefined list of eligible vehicles to provide automatic access to authorized users, which are the vehicles with access permission. The predefined list contains both the vehicles that have been previously added by the parking controller and the ones that have paid for a reservation prior to arrival through the application (i.e., they are automatically added). This approach can be used as a means of control in parking lots and to combat vandalism. Additionally, a dedicated parking control ramp that is compatible with the other devices in the parking control system and the management system should be added. In this way, the speed of the traffic flow will increase, providing added value to the visitors of the parking IoT. With this smart parking system, the driver will be able to save a lot of time, effort, and cost [31]. Studies on the impact of parking pain in major countries show that in New York a driver spends 107 h a year in the search for a parking place, while around 65 h is spent in London and Frankfurt on average. While searching for an empty parking spot, New York drivers waste $4.3 billion per year in time, fuel, and emissions [31]. On the other hand, the real-time information on parking space usage can be utilized to reduce the parking search traffic, optimize the usage of parking, reduce emissions (CO\({}_{2}\) and dust), and improve parking revenue. The Architecture of the Proposed Parking Solution: The Integration of NB-IoT Technology into the Core IoT Platform  
Smart parking solutions for cars, vehicles, and motorcycles can use NB-IoT devices with various kinds of sensors, including infrared (IR) sensors, active-passive infrared (AIR/PIR) sensors, magneto-resistive (MR) sensors, or ultrasonic sensors, to discover available parking spots. The solution proposed in this paper is tested with dual detection technology sensors (infrared and magnetic). Each sensor has an NB-IoT UE chip. The UE senses the availability of a parking spot and sends the data through the eNodeB to a central server (or gateway). Figure 18: A scenario involving the use of the proposed solution for smart parking. The server receives all data from the cellular and regional NB-IoT devices and stores them in a cloud-based storage area for further processing and analysis. The server and storage facility can be both co-located in the cloud.