Occupancy-Aware Power Saving for Smart Parking IoT Sensors

IoT sensors in smart parking, according to their sleep duration, wake up automatically and make the sensing to determine parking spot status (vacant/occupied). These periodic awakenings, if they are necessary and useful when the parking spot is vacant, they are much less when it is occupied. Here we propose a new algorithm based on occupancy-aware concept to adopt an opportunistic sleep duration. When the spot is vacant, the sensor will wake up according to the conventional sleep duration. However, once the parking place is detected occupied, the sensor will not wake up according to this time but according to another time greater than the previous sleep time duration. The first results obtained by our approach are promising. Thanks to our new occupancy-aware algorithm, the battery lifetime of IoT parking sensors is more than tripled when the occupancy rate is important.