First deployment for Libelium's Smart Parking sensor platform

Spain-headquartered Libelium, a specialist in wireless sensor networks, has announced the launch of its Waspmote-based Smart Parking platform, part of the company’s smart cities solution designed to be buried in parking spaces and to detect the arrival and departure of vehicles. The company says the platform, which will allow system integrators to offer comprehensive parking management solutions to city councils, will shortly be deployed in Santander, Spain.
January 27, 2012 Read time: 2 mins

Spain-headquartered 740 Libelium, a specialist in wireless sensor networks, has announced the launch of its Waspmote-based Smart Parking platform, part of the company’s smart cities solution designed to be buried in parking spaces and to detect the arrival and departure of vehicles. The company says the platform, which will allow system integrators to offer comprehensive parking management solutions to city councils, will shortly be deployed in Santander, Spain.

Libelium’s Smart Parking sensors can be buried in parking spaces and communicate with the rest of the sensor network using Waspmote’s ZigBee radio. According to Alicia Asín, CEO of Libelium,  “The first deployment of the platform will be with 742 SmartSantander – a unique city-scale experiment in applications of smart city technology which is already considered as a reference in the Smart Cities field”. In fact, the Network Planning and Mobile Communications Group from the University of Cantabria contributed to the testing and performance improvement of the sensor. Initially, 100 nodes are being installed in a pilot while the next phase will cover around 800 nodes in parking slots and street lights, for measuring environmental parameters, but eventually, around 12,000 sensors will be installed over the next three years.

According to Asín, Waspmote’s outstanding power management and over the air programming (OTA) mean that, once installed, parking sensors do not need to be accessed for years. Motes only need to transmit when a parking event – a vehicle arriving or leaving a space – takes place. With suitable batteries a sensor can operate for five years before it needs to be physically accessed for battery replacement. OTA programming enables the software for entire networks to be upgraded efficiently over the radio network without digging up the parking spaces. The low maintenance involved in smart parking sensor networks means that networks with hundreds of nodes can readily be deployed.

Smart parking sensors communicate with their gateway via radios at either 2.4 GHz or 868/900 MHz. For 2.4 GHz ZigBee connections, mesh networks are implemented with routing motes located in street lights. For the lower frequency radios, it is possible for parking sensors to communicate directly with the gateway as the propagation distance is longer.

Parking & Access Control Detection, Monitoring & Machine Vision Classification & Data Collection

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • First French ITS project for Init
    November 28, 2013
    ITS and ticketing provider INIT is to equip French public transport company Transport en Commun de la Région d´Avignon (TCRA) in Greater Avignon with a new intermodal transport control system (ITCS) and TETRA digital radio system. The solution will replace the existing fleet management system and be operational by the end of 2014. In the first phase, around 138 public buses are to be integrated into the ITCS. Additionally, 24 trams running on the newly constructed tram lines are to be linked up to the s
    Read More
  • Cloud Parc’s smart parking
    September 10, 2014
    Cloud Parc is debuting its smart parking camera solutions in the Entrepreneurial Village, highlighting its ability to automatically detect unused parking spaces through visual analysis. Each LPR camera can monitor up to 10 spaces while the company’s Sky camera can monitor an entire city block. According to Kerrian Bard Fournier, COO, Cloud Parc
    Read More
  • IT security? Get your head in the cloud
    January 23, 2020
    Cloud-based operations have been around for a decade or so - and Andy Souders of All Traffic Solutions suggests they are increasingly viable solutions for the transportation sector
    Read More
  • Developments in security for wireless communications networks
    July 20, 2012
    David Crawford looks at new developments in security for wireless communications networks. Wireless communications - including mobile phone links - are well recognised as a key transport technology. They are low-cost, easily installed, well supported by the wider IT industry and offer the protocols of choice for much metropolitan area networking on which transport applications can piggyback.
    Read More

Highlighted Content