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

  • SICE to implement public transit priority system for public transport in Spanish city
    August 11, 2017
    TESINGER, a company belonging to the Perteo Group, has awarded SICE the contract for the installation of a traffic signal priority system to reduce public transport delays at intersections in the city of Santander, Spain. The works are part of the Infrastructure Construction Project for the Metro-TUS implementation, the city’s new high speed bus service. SICE’s RBG1402-I2V Prioritisation and Geolocation System is an integrated solution enabling intelligent wireless communication between public transport veh
    Read More
  • Cloud-based app paves way for near field ticketing
    December 17, 2013
    Cubic latest introduction provides a short cut for transit authorities looking to offer travellers mobile, smart phone payment options. Transit operators wanting to provide travellers with a mobile fare payment option now have an ‘off-the-shelf’ solution in Cubic’s NextWave. Through the use of near field communications (NFC) technology, NextWave turns travellers’ mobile phones and tablets into the equivalent of a ticket vending machine able to instantly re-load contactless transit cards. It also enables the
    Read More
  • High speed surfing in France and Italy
    May 18, 2012
    Two announcements on the same day – from the OCEA Consortium and from Andrew Solutions - have reported overcoming the challenges of internet access in high-speed trains travelling at over 200mph (320km/h) in France and Italy. The technological achievements realised by the consortium have risen to the challenge of ensuring service at high speed in a high voltage electrical environment, and integrating the system's maintenance into the overall maintenance schedules of a high-speed network with no impact on th
    Read More
  • New solutions to old problems set to cut emergency response times
    April 30, 2015
    David Crawford looks at the latest developments in emergency response. Ensuring speedier reactions to transport and travel crises is becoming increasingly important. US statistics suggest that as many as 1,000 ‘saveable’ lives can be lost each year in major cities because of operational defects in their SOS operations.
    Read More

Highlighted Content