Most of us are acquainted with how frustrating it can be trying to find a parking spot in a crowded big city, especially when driving your family to a fancy restaurant downtown, hoping to spend a wonderful night out, but end up wasting your precious time on parking. As technologies are ever changing people's lives, there is no exception when it comes to parking. In the near future, parking will be unprecedentedly convenient with the help of an app on your phone. You can find and reserve a parking spot before you head out the door, follow the app's built in GPS navigation, and pay for the parking spot inside the app. NB-IoT-based Smart Parking is the technology behind this miraculous experience.

Most of the industry is just demonstrating new technologies, but China Unicom Shanghai, Huawei, and TransInfo have worked together to create and deploy a smart curbside parking area in the Minhang District of Shanghai, demonstrating a proof of concept with tremendous potential for the NB-IoT application.

To guarantee a first-mover advantage with NB-IoT, operators around the globe are deploying low power wideband area networks (LPWANs). The industry is eagerly awaiting the wide coverage, low power, low cost, and massive connections of NB-IoT. China Unicom Shanghai has also been an early pioneer. The Smart Parking solution deployed in the Minhang District is a typical application that blends NB-IoT into parking, an effort to make big-city parking easier.

As the vehicle penetration rate in Shanghai keeps growing, traffic congestion has not been the only problem. Parking has grown more difficult as well. About 30% of the vehicles in Shanghai are looking for parking spots on any given day. 10% of all the fuel they consume is wasted driving around looking for parking, leading to a waste of money. Today's parking garages may use a wide variety of high-tech techniques and devices, but curbside parking has a long way to go. Curbside parking is scattered across wide areas. The entrances and exits are uncontrollable. These two facts impede deployment of most IoT technologies. The lack of these technologies causes a series of problems:

• Hands-on management expensive and inefficient
  Collecting payments from traditional parking meters is time consuming and expensive.
• Payment system unreliable
  There is no reliable mechanism to ensure that all parking fees are collected.
• Turnover rate low
  Parking spaces exist as isolated information islands, with their status not networked.

The Smart Parking solution worked out by China Unicom Shanghai, Huawei, and TransInfo is an innovative new integrated application of NB-IoT and the Internet. With the use of magnetic vehicle detectors, an NB-IoT network, a cloud IoT platform, and a phone app, this solution uses multiple smart technologies to collect parking data. Smart technologies are used to monitor the status of available spots, to search for available spots, to manage and collect online payments, and to regulate parking behavior. The NB-IoT magnetic vehicle detectors are proven to be reliable by the live network commissioning and stability tests spanning half a year. NB-IoT power consumption, a common concern for the entire industry, has also been verified in the Smart Parking solution. The current data shows that one 19 Ah battery should be able to run an NB-IoT device for three years.

NB-IoT-based Smart Parking solution jointly launched by China Unicom Shanghai, Huawei, and TransInfo

Besides making parking easier for the drivers, this solution also resolves issues faced by parking management companies:

• Management cost savings and improved efficiency
  Smart parking can free up employees, reallocating labor from fee collection to parking supervision, directing traffic, and patrolling parking facilities.
• Refined management
  Online payment via WeChat (a popular Chinese app) or the parking app ensures that every parking fee is collected.
• Low cost and easy installation
  Vehicle detectors can connect directly to the base stations in a wireless manner. They do not need special cabling, access to a power supply, or the installation of repeaters and gateways attached to lampposts.
• Breakdown of the information silo
  The parking space data is networked with carrier-grade reliability. This also paves the way for smart transportation.

A smart curbside parking area in the Minhang District of Shanghai

China Unicom Shanghai and TransInfo indicate that the smart curbside parking solution deployed as a test run in the Minhang District is aimed at improving the solution and user experience it delivers. If the solution passes reliability tests in the second half of the year, the three parties will start promoting the solution throughout Shanghai and use this solution to showcase the possibilities. Huawei has been responsible for integrating the technology with the network services in this joint trial. They have stated that the results of this trial have exceeded expectations. The Huawei project owner, Zheng Xuefeng, says that LPWA connections will exceed 3 billion, making LPWA the future of the IoT market. The implementation of this project has shown that NB-IoT is destined to become a mainstream LPWA technology, to invigorate the market, and to accelerate widespread deployment of LPWA.