Zigbee Smart Parking Architecture | Zigbee Smart Parking basics

This use case covers basics of zigbee smart parking architecture. It describes various elements of zigbee based smart parking architecture.

Introduction:
We know that in metropolitan cities, vehicle drivers struggle to locate the vacant parking space especially in rush hours. Sometimes it is too much time consuming and often lead to traffic congestion as well as air pollution. Sometimes drivers get frustrated.

In order to avoid this situation, smart parking systems have been developed. There are many smart parking systems based on different wireless technologies such as wifi, zigbee, LoRa etc.

The zigbee and LoRa based smart parking systems have become more popular due to less power consumption. Such systems will have longer battery life approx. about 10 to 15 years. The zigbee based smart parking system is shown in the figure-1. Let us understand various elements of zigbee smart parking architecture.

Zigbee based smart parking architecture

zigbee smart parking architecture
Figure-1: Block diagram of zigbee based Smart parking architecture

As shown there are three main parts of the smart parking architecture system.
• IR sensor based zigbee nodes :
The entire parking region has been divided into different areas having more than one parking slots. Figure depicts parking area with three slots. IR sensor based module is installed in each of the parking slots. There are two components in a IR sensor viz. IR transmitter and IR receiver. If the vehicle is present, IR light reflects back and will have large magnitude. If the vehicle is absent, no IR light or minimum will reflects back and hence will have less magnitude. This is being monitored by microcontroller. All the boards of parking slots provide information either wirelessly(i.e. zigbee frequency) or using wired connection (RS232/RS485) to the Zigbee gateway.

• Zigbee gateway:
It consists of microprocessor, memory and other peripherals. It interfaces with server or IP networks based on ethernet connection. It provides connectivity with zigbee end nodes installed at parking slots using zigbee frequency (2.4 GHz or 868/915 MHz). It has connectivity with wifi and cellular networks as well. Zigbee nodes provide information to the gateway regularly and hence it will have all the parking slot informations. This can be made available to the drivers upon request through UI applications.

• Mobile or desktop based UI application:
The GUI application can run in the desktop or in the smartphone. It can be developed using visual basic or .NET. The mobile phone is interfaced with the server over internet. This helps mobile app in obtaining live parking slot information from gateway.

Advantages of Zigbee Smart parking architecture

Following are the merit/benefits/advantages of zigbee smart parking architecture system.
• Easy maintenance and management using click of a button in the UI application.
• Long life due to less power consumption.
• Can be monitored using cellular, wifi and zigbee connection.
• Less costs due to availability of cheaper microcontrollers and other required peripherals.
• Will ease burden of finding vacant parking space and will save time to great extent.

Zigbee Related Links

•  what is zigbee
•  Zigbee network architecture basics
•  Zigbee Protocol Stack
•  Zigbee Physical layers
•  Zigbee physical layer frame
•  Zigbee MAC layer frames
•  Zigbee frequency bands
•  Zigbee Gadgets
•  Zigbee Products

RF and Wireless Terminologies