## 1 Introduction  
In September 2009, the European Union (EU) endorsed an Internet of Things (IoT) Strategic Research Roadmap, proposed by the Cluster of European Research Projects (CERP), named CERP-IoT [1], with the purpose of promoting, sharing and propagandizing the research projects and related research outcomes in the IoT area, especially the application of sensor technology in IoT, such as Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) [2], family-domain smart eHealth/mHealth, wearable sensing and computing, green buildings, smart homes, smart cities, _etc._ The report formally proposes a new communication dimension of information and communication technology (ICT)--Maintained at any time, in anyplace, by anything and anyone, providing any service within any network. In fact, this is an extension and further development (bringing it to a new level) of the \"anytime-anywhere-anyhow\" communication paradigm [3,4], Figure 1. In the public tender announcement (for a 7 billion euro annual financial support) of the EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), multiple projects related to IoT in nearly 20 areas were supported. The IoT platforms could be categorized into four types: eGovernment-related, production/ enterprise-based, company-based, and pure business-oriented platforms. Figure 2 illustrates these four types of the IoT platforms, which are described in more detail below. The eGovernment IoT is the supporting foundation that should facilitate the city's/region's/state's economic development and management. It is usually funded through a government's public welfare scheme, which gradually promotes the development of eGovernment towards the IoT. The  
Figure 1: A high-level view of the Internet of Things. eGovernment IoT platform needs information relevance to prevent the 'information island' effect and to ensure network- and information security. The enterprise-based and company-based IoT platforms can improve competitiveness and service assurance of market-oriented enterprises and companies. These require independently funded IoT projects for more efficient production management, warehousing, distribution, transportation, logistics, marketing, and supply chain management. The pure business-oriented IoT platforms may become an important facilitator as optimization and integration of information market resources require involving all end-users, network providers, and service providers to build a modern industry established on valuable IoT business models and platforms. The CERP-IoT report [1] predicted that the automotive industry will be using'smart things' to monitor everything. Especially when using wireless technology for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication, the real-time locating systems (RTLS) can enable tracking and tracing services, which will significantly advance the ITS applications. The intelligent car parking systems, such as the one described in this paper, constitute an important part of the ITS with a primary purpose to find, allocate, reserve, and provide the 'best' available car parking lot to each individual user who is driving a car in a particular area. Valuable add-on functionality could be the provision of navigation instructions to the driver for reaching the lot. These systems may serve as a foundation and a common business model for a generic IoT operational platform due to their properties of providing pure business-oriented services. Researchers in [5] show that more than 66% of drivers do not mind paying for car parking facilities during their working hours. This directly adds value to the car parking business, which is a stimulus for the development of intelligent car parking services for smart cities. The existing car parking systems are not very efficient as they do not provide the 'best' service, e.g., finding the nearest available car parking lot. At the sensor layer, most of researchers today focus on detecting the car-parking-lot occupancy.