Abstract
With the advancement in IoT technology, its applications have been widely adopted in different domains to enable smart applications to facilitate users’ lives. One aspect is the parking issue which has become a serious issue, especially in crowded cities due to a growing shortage of locations for operators to park their vehicles and a growing number of parking lots and facilities constructed to compensate. Meanwhile, homeowners and landowners leave vacant spaces that could be utilized by the enlarging population of motorists if they weren’t on private property. In this paper, we propose a Decentralized Parking system, DPark, built on top of Blockchain technology. After spot owners register their spots’ information on the Blockchain, drivers can explore owner-registered parking spots within their area that fit their needs in regard to availability, price, and location, and then book a desired spot for the price listed by the spot owner. Most importantly, all of these exchanges occur through Blockchain transactions. Blockchain provides transparency, security, and resistance to single-failure attacks. Spot owners are able to make profits from their unused space, drivers are able to find cheap and local parking, and the environment benefits from less construction of ordinary public and private parking solutions. DPark is then implemented on two different Blockchains, namely Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of DPark by considering the different transactions sent by drivers/spot owners at scale. Our results indicate that Hyperledger Fabric outperforms Ethereum in terms of latency and throughput, especially when the total number of transactions increases significantly. Hyperledger Fabric has demonstrated scalability up to 20,000 total transactions with high throughput of around 150 transactions per second and negligible latency. Ethereum had lower throughput of around 20 transactions per second while also exhibiting linear growth in latency relative to total transactions. Thus, these results highlight the benefit of choosing a permissioned Blockchain instead of a public Blockchain.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
All data, or code generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request.
References
McCoy, K.: Drivers spend an average of 17 hours a year searching for parking spots (2017). https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/07/12/parking-pain-causes-financial-and-personal-strain/467637001/. Accessed 7/3/2023
Arnott, R., Rave, T., Schöb, R., et al.: Alleviating urban traffic congestion. MIT Press Books 1 (2005)
Shoup, D.: Cruising for parking. Access Magazine. 1(30), 16–23 (2007)
Cookson, G., Pishue, B.: The Impact of Parking Pain in the US, UK and Germany. INRIX Research (2017)
Ni, J., Lin, X., Shen, X.: Toward privacy-preserving valet parking in autonomous driving era. IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol. 68(3), 2893–2905 (2019)
What is a smart parking system? functionalities and benefits. https://tomorrow.city/a/smart-parking. Accessed 7/3/2023
Motherboard: Uber china statement on service outage. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3daa55/ubers-china-problem. Accessed 7/3/2023
Parkmobile, https://parkmobile.io/parking-solutions/ . Accessed 7/3/2023
Tran Thi Kim, O., Tran, N.H., Pham, C., LeAnh, T., Thai, M.T., Hong, C.S.: Parking assignment: minimizing parking expenses and balancing parking demand among multiple parking lots. IEEE Trans. Autom. Sci. Eng. 17(3), 1320–1331 (2020)
Yang, D., Xu, H., Feng, Z., Meng, L., Long, C., Peng, S.: A scheme to optimize roadside parking management by using blockchain technology. In: 2020 IEEE 6th International Conference on Computer and Communications (ICCC). pp. 2235–2239 (2020)
Zinonos, Z., Christodoulou, P., Andreou, A., Chatzichristofis, S.: Parkchain: An iot parking service based on blockchain. In: 2019 15th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS). pp. 687–693 (2019)
Yan, P., Cai, X., Ni, D., Chu, F., He, H.: Two-stage matching-and-scheduling algorithm for real-time private parking-sharing programs. Comput. Oper. Res. 125, 105083 (2021)
Ahmed, S., Soaibuzzaman, Rahman, M. S., Rahaman, M. S.: A blockchain-based architecture for integrated smart parking systems. In: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PerCom Workshops). pp. 177–182 (2019)
Hu, J., He, D., Zhao, Q., Choo, K.K.R.: Parking management: a blockchain-based privacy-preserving system. IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine. 8(4), 45–49 (2019)
Zhang, C., Zhu, L., Xu, C., Zhang, C., Sharif, K., Wu, H., Westermann, H.: Bsfp: Blockchain-enabled smart parking with fairness, reliability and privacy protection. IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol. 69(6), 6578–6591 (2020)
An, D., Yang, Q., Li, D., Yu, W., Zhao, W., Yan, C.B.: Where am i parking: incentive electronic parking-space sharing mechanism with privacy protection. IEEE Trans. Autom. Sci. Eng. 19(1), 143–162 (2022)
Hyperledger fabric sdk for node.js, https://hyperledger.github.io/fabric-sdk-node/
React.js, https://reactjs.org/
Express.js, https://expressjs.com/
Solidity, https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/v0.8.12/. Accessed 7/3/2023
Truffle suite, https://trufflesuite.com/
Hyperledger caliper, https://www.hyperledger.org/use/caliper
Proof-of-work (pow), https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pow/. Accessed 7/3/2023
Funding
The authors are thankful to the Dean-ship of Scientific Research at Najran University for funding this work, under the General Research Funding program grant code (NU/RG/SERC/12/27).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Garrett Brenner and Mohamed Baza - developed the concept of the article, designed the structure of the article, analyzed the available literature, and developed the introduction and summary. Amar Rasheed and Wassila Lalouani provide project administration, validation of results, writing–review, and editing, and Hani Alshahrani and Mahmoud Badr managed writing-review, and editing, and the funding acquisition. and All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing Interests
The authors declared that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.We declare that we do not have any commercial or associative interest that represents a conflict of interest in connection with the work submitted.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Brenner, G., Baza, M., Rasheed, A. et al. DPark: Decentralized Smart Private-Parking System using Blockchains. J Grid Computing 21, 43 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-023-09677-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-023-09677-8