Parking Assistance System for Indoor Environment

In the last decade, indoor location based applications, such as touristic guide in museums or shopping guidance in supermarkets, have been developed rapidly requiring suitable and accurate indoor positioning. However, location sensing in indoor environments is a challenging task and an intensively researched topic. Fortunately, wireless technologies can help us derive location information. In this paper, we propose and introduce our positioning and navigation system for indoor parking garage environment, called iParking, which has been under development. The iParking system collects real-time parking lot occupancy data, and tracks and navigates vehicles entering the parking garage to a preselected, e.g., the closest to the favorite shop, free parking lot. The driver’s smartphone is used as the navigation interface. The system is built on a background Wi-Fi infrastructure making the deployment and maintenance economical. Currently, we have been implementing a prototype of our iParking system in a parking garage of a shopping mall for demonstration purposes