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In recent years, many city governments around the world have begun to use information and communication technology to increase the management efficiency of on-street parking. Among various experimental smart parking projects, deployment of wireless magnetic sensors and smart parking meters are quite common. However, using wireless magnetic sensors can only detect the occupancy of parking spaces without the knowledge of who are currently using these parking spaces; human labor is still needed to issue the parking bills. In contrast, smart parking meters based on image recognition can detect the occupancy of parking spaces along with the license plate numbers, but the cost of deploying smart parking meters is relatively high. In this research, we investigate the feasibility of building an on-street parking management system mainly based on low-cost Bluetooth beacons. Specifically, beacon transmitters are installed in the vehicles, and beacon receivers are deployed along the roadside parking spaces. By processing the received beacon signals using Kalman filter, our system can detect the occupancy of parking spaces as well as the identification of the vehicles. Although distance estimation using the received signal strength is not accurate, our experiments show that it suffices for correct detection of parking occupancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ubiquity of Bluetooth-enabled smartphones and peripherals has brought tremendous convenience to our daily life. In recent years, Bluetooth beacons have also been gaining popularity in implementing a variety of innovative location-based services such as self-guided systems in exhibition centers. However, the broadcast-based beacon technology can only provide unidirectional communication. In case smartphone users would like to respond to the beacon messages, they have to rely on their own mobile Internet connections to send the information back to the backend system. Nevertheless, mobile Internet services may not be always available or too costly. In this work, we develop a real-time locating system based only on the Bluetooth low energy (BLE) technology to support interactive communications by combining the broadcast and mesh topology options to extend the applicability of beacon solutions. Specifically, we turn the smartphone into a beacon device and augment the beacon devices with the capability of forming a mesh network. The implementation result shows that our beacon devices can detect the presence of specific users at specific locations, and then the presence state can be sent to the application server via the relay of beacon devices. Moreover, the application server can send personalized location-based messages to the users, again via the relay of beacon devices. With the capability of relaying messages between the beacon devices, it would be convenient for developers to implement a variety of interactive applications such as tracking VIP customers at the airport, or tracking an elder with Alzheimer’s disease in the neighborhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]