Parking IoT: An IoT Architecture to Collect Availability Data from Parking Lots

City centers have been, are, and will be the focus of people's attention. One of the current problems of this focus is parking slot scarcity. The aim of this study is to ease the management of scarce parking resources by efficiently detecting and reporting empty slots. The presented design includes best practices during data collection through low-cost IoT devices, which include a single bit light sensor to detect the availability of parking slots, as well as efficient routing over IoT devices by data aggregation. The simulation results indicate that the proposed architecture led to a trade-off between network delay versus energy consumption as well as network delay versus unit cost. Therefore, the proposed architecture lets an investor parameterize the costs and efficiency prior to deployment.