Anglo-Australian technology company, Smart Parking, has launched its newly designed SmartSpot Internet of Things (IoT) gateway, with new and improved features adapted to meet the needs of smart city operators worldwide.
The SmartSpot gateway is an integral part of the company’s ‘SmartPark’ system. Mounted on a pole, wall or ceiling, it acts as the central communication unit that collects data from vehicle detection sensors via wireless communication and transmits it to the cloud parking services system. In addition to providing the interface between the sensors and cloud, SmartSpot can also act as a common IoT gateway platform that is flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of connectivity requirements and protocols within smart city environments, ranging from common Ethernet and wifi compatible devices, such as cameras and street lighting, to standards such as Zigbee/802.15.4, LoRaWAN, 3G, 4G, and the upcoming 5G.
One SmartSpot gateway can serve hundreds of sensors within a city environment, which dramatically lowers the number of gateway units required, which in turn lowers the overall cost of ownership. Councils worldwide are already beginning to consider the benefits of installing SmartSpot gateways, with Wellington City Council in New Zealand deploying a total of 84 SmartSpots to create a redundant SmartZone coverage of the total area of the city’s CBD (Central Business District), and the UK, Cardiff City Council are to commence deployment of a similar number of SmartSpots in what will be Europe’s first city-wide roll-out of parking bay sensor technology.
SmartSpots are centrally managed and operated from the SmartCloud service platform, which provides a comprehensive and flexible suite of service solutions that support diverse and advanced parking service requirements at all levels of scale. The SmartCloud platform is delivered on top of the Amazon web services (AWS) cloud infrastructure, which establishes a fully flexible global regionalization, unlimited high availability capacity, and the most competitive resource economics.
“The SmartSpot gateway is unique amongst IoT gateways and within the smart parking markets, as it delivers smart cities with the simple practicality of a single ‘street furniture’ gateway installed throughout the city that can meet the high demands of accurate, enforceable parking information, while simultaneously accommodating an open range of additional services, such as public broadband, safety video surveillance, air quality, lighting control, and much more,” said John Heard, Smart Parking’s CTO. “Secure communications over Ethernet, wifi, 3G, and 4G can be used to network the real-time information with the SmartCloud service platform, using various low power radio mechanisms the SmartSpots send and receive data from sensors. Over-the-air (OTA) provisioning, configuration management, and firmware updates also mean that these devices are kept up to date with the latest software upgrades.”
Smart Parking’s CEO, Paul Gillespie, added, “Unlike some alternative providers of bay sensor technology, we continue to push the boundaries by building on existing solutions to deliver what is now called the IoT and the integration of many other types of smart city services.”
