A parking guidance system can help a driver quickly find an available parking space. Most currently available parking guidance systems require wire deployment in installation, thus entailing high installation costs. In this chapter, we discuss the network design of a low-power parking guidance system. We developed a tiered communication architecture including Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) network and Internet to realize wireless parking space availability data transmission, and thus installation complexity can be greatly reduced. In order to reduce the battery replacement frequency of the WSN, we designed a power-minimized Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol. The proposed MAC protocol divides one network working cycle into four dedicated intervals to realize robust network organization and energy-efficient data delivery. Experimental results showed that the proposed MAC protocol can extend the battery lifetime of the WSN to more than ten years. Based on the collected parking space availability data, we built a portable parking guidance terminal to let drivers locate available parking spaces conveniently.
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