DPark: Decentralized Smart Private-Parking System using Blockchains

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.