# Designing and Managing a Smart Parking System Using Wireless Sensor Networks
## 1 Introduction  
With the change of the global economy and modern life, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector has experienced a vital acceleration in its process, to adapt at such change. Today, people spend most of their time outside of their home environments, they travel daily to work, and they frequently go shopping centres and attractions, without forgetting the displacements to the centre of the city. This certainly caused an imbalance in the daily mobility that led to the development of parking services to avoid unnecessary driving around the city centre to simply search for a parking space. This, on the one hand, causes additional carbon dioxide emissions and damages the environment of the city's ecosystem. On the other hand, it increases drivers' frustration and traffic congestion in the city, which will certainly cause traffic accidents. All of this degrades the experience of the modern city's ecosystem and has become a major challenge in the development of future smart parking systems. Smart parking systems are systems that manage the difficulty of parking in the city in public or private areas, using several recent technologies, including WSNs (wireless sensor networks) and RFID (radio frequency identification) [1; 2; 3; 4]. These systems obtain information on the available parking spaces in a parking area using real-time data collection by the sensor nodes scattered in the parking area, which allows users to use the additional services implemented by these systems, such as the automated payment service compatible with mobile phones, so that people can reserve their parking space in advance. Figure 1 illustrates the general architecture of a smart parking system. The system we propose in this article offers a solution based on an adaptable and hybrid self-organization algorithm for WSN networks, which allows to find a parking space in the two types of outdoor parking in a city. The first one is the \"linear outdoor parking area\" (Figure 2) which is a parking area located mainly on the main streets, alleys, and the centre of the city, where all parking spaces of the parking area form a single line. There are currently three types of linear outdoor parking areas (Figure 3). Slash-type parking is the easiest to park while the horizontal is the most difficult, followed by the vertical one. The second type is \"Mass outdoor parking\" which has a larger parking space than the linear car parks and are in the peripherals of the city and in larger areas like a technological park, shopping centre, etc. (Figure 4). Figure 1: Smart parking system. Figure 3: The types of linear outdoor parking (**a**) Horizontal type; (**b**) Vertical type; (**c**) Slash-type. Figure 2: Linear outdoor parking. Many smart parking management systems use self-organization algorithms for wireless sensor networks that are efficient and effective for a single type of parking (linear parking or mass parking), but they do not have the same performances for another type of parking. For example, for linear car parks, most of the self-organization algorithms used are based on chain formation, knowing that there are few sensors in the parking area, which allows minimizing the energy consumption between the different nodes and improving the energy efficiency in the network. However, this type of algorithm is not efficient and effective for mass parking knowing that there are many sensors in the car parking that introduce delays in the delivery of data to the gateway and that will create a load unbalance between the different nodes of the chain. For this reason, the self-organization algorithm for wireless sensor networks adopted by our system is adaptable for both types of parking (linear and mass) by forming chains or clusters according to the type, and which considers the limits of these networks in terms of energy consumption during the wireless communication process in order to increase the lifetime of the sensors and the longevity of the WSN network, by creating a powerful and sustainable system.