An Intelligent Real-Time Vehicle Parking Slot Detection and Management System using Internet of Things
1 Department of Computer Applications (MCA), Davangere University, Davangere, Karnataka, India.
2 Department of Computer Applications, Davangere University, Davangere, Karnataka, India.
3 Department of Library and Information Science, Davangere University, Davangere, Karnataka, India.
4 Department of Computer Science, Davangere University, Davangere, Karnataka, India.
Research Article
Open Access Research Journal of Engineering and Technology, 2026, 11(01), 034–041.
Article DOI: 10.53022/oarjet.2026.11.1.0055
Publication history:
Received on 15 June 2026; revised on 20 July 2026; accepted on 23 July 2026
Abstract:
The rapid growth of urban vehicle ownership has made the search for available parking space one of the most persistent inconveniences faced by commuters in cities today. Manual parking management is slow, inefficient, and often leads to traffic congestion, fuel wastage, and driver frustration near commercial and residential complexes. This paper presents a Smart Parking IoT System that automates the detection and management of parking slot availability using low-cost embedded sensors connected through the Internet of Things (IoT). The proposed system employs ultrasonic distance sensors installed at each parking slot to continuously monitor occupancy status, a microcontroller unit (NodeMCU ESP8266 / Arduino) to acquire and process sensor data, and a cloud-connected dashboard together with a mobile/web interface that displays real-time slot availability to users. The system architecture, data acquisition pipeline, feature extraction approach, and slot-status classification[14] logic are described in detail, followed by the experimental setup used to validate the prototype and the performance metrics used to evaluate it. Results obtained from prototype testing indicate that the system can reliably detect occupancy status with high accuracy and low latency, while remaining significantly cheaper to deploy than camera- or image-processing-based alternatives. The paper concludes with a discussion of the system's limitations and outlines directions for future enhancement, including RFID-based vehicle authentication, solar-powered nodes, and machine-learning-based occupancy prediction.
Keywords:
IoT; Smart Parking; Ultrasonic Sensor; NodeMCU ESP8266; Real-Time Monitoring; Smart City
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Copyright © 2026 Author(s) retain the copyright of this article. This article is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Liscense 4.0