First deployment for Libelium's Smart Parking sensor platform

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.