Investigating Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication for Cooperative Car Parking: the CoPark Approach

Significant time is wasted and fuel consumed as a result of vehicles cruising inside carparks looking for vacant carpark spaces, especially with an increasing number of vehicles on the road. This could lead to traffic congestion and delay in finding appropriate parking space as the vehicles traverse the same parking areas. In this paper, we investigate a smart car parking system using a largely decentralized approach called CoPark, which explores the advantages of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication for vehicles to find and choose car park spaces. Based on observations of the carpark environment through information gleaned from other vehicles, each vehicle can "negotiate" with other vehicles that come within its V2V communication range and decide on the proposed search areas. We show by simulations and experimentation that there are significant effects of this approach on reducing parking search time; for instance, the CoPark approach can achieve a reduction in the average search time of up to 57% compared to a noncooperative approach.