Car-Park Management using WSNs

Responsible:

• Sean Twomey

In the coming years the use of wireless sensor networks to control many aspects of our lives will be come place. Currently MISL and Tyndall are jointly researching and developing one such application for the control and monitoring of car parking space usage.

The platform runs a tailored version of TinyOS, an operating system designed at UC Berkeley and engineered to run in hardware platforms with severe resource constraints. On top of the Operating System will be code for controlling the sensor, for sending sending and receiving messages and for relaying messages from other nodes. Messages can be routing through a number of nodes before they are received at a Base Station node. Java code will be used to retrieve the information from the Base Station node.

Apache will be used in conjunction with tomcat and MySQL to support the web based GUI.

Network of DSYS25z Sensor Nodes

The application being developed will use a network of DSYS25z sensor nodes which are developed by Tyndall. The Sensor nodes have a layered hardware architecture. The layers consist of a microprocessor, a wireless radio transceiver, a sensor and a power cell. Previous iterations of the DSYS25z Sensor nodes used a magnet sensor of detecting the presence of a car.

Car Park Space Usage

The system will maintain a database with information on each car park space usage. Some of the information being stored in the database include time, location, status and node route of the received message.

A web based GUI will be provided accessing the data in various forms. Graphs, reports and maps will be generated for live and auditing the Parking spaces usage. It should be possible also to configure the hard from the GUI interface.