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Recommended by Haigang Gong
School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China
Received 16 October 2012; Accepted 13 November 2012
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Finding an available parking space in a crowded urban area or a large parking lot is always time-consuming, which would incur great economic losses, for example, searching for free parking spaces causes total of 20 million Euros economic damage per year in the district Schwabing of Munich, including 3.5 million Euros for gasoline and diesel and 150000 hours of waiting time [ 1]. Moreover, a recent study [ 2] discovers that about 30% of the traffic congestion is caused by vehicles cruising around their destination and looking for a place to park. Therefore, it is of great significance to address the problems associated with parking in crowded urban areas. Obviously, if drivers are provided with efficient parking guidance services, the parking spaces searching costs would be greatly reduced and the traffic congestion would be also relieved to some extent.
In the last decade, many research efforts have been devoted to designing efficient parking guidance systems [ 3- 7]. These works could be generally classified into two categories: sensors based scheme and RSUs based scheme. In the sensors based scheme [ 3- 5], fixed sensors are deployed in the parking lot to monitor parking spaces, which provide real-time parking space availability information for the drivers looking for parking spaces. One of the biggest weaknesses of this approach is that it necessitates a large installation cost and operational cost in order to adequately monitor the parking spaces at a city-wide level. According to a Department of Transportation report [ 8], the installation cost of typical per spot parking management systems ranges from $250-$800 per spot. Moreover, the deployed sensors might become invalid over a period of time owing to the power exhaustion. In the RSUs based scheme [ 6, 7], it employs the parking lot RSUs to monitor the whole parking lot and perform parking guidance. This scheme is proved...