Multi-Agent Parking in Smart Cities: The ChirpPark Protocol for Connected Vehicles

City traffic congestion and air pollution are also brought about by poor parking management and in the city it is always more difficult to identify a vacant parking slot. In this article, we present ChirpPark, an energy-efficient distributed IoT-based intelligent parking system protocol based on the LoRa communication protocol. ChirpPark operates autonomously without the need for an Internet connection, facilitating realtime parking allocation and status inquiries through long-range communication. It also has an optional MQTT-based sync system for gateway-to-gateway and gateway-to-central data collector data exchange, utilised for telemetry and analytics. In contrast to conventional centralised approaches, ChirpPark promotes decentralised decision-making, thereby enhancing resilience and scalability for deployment in urban areas that may experience intermittent or no connectivity. The experimental findings, encompassing a real proof-of-concept deployment, using ESP32 boards and a simulated environment, demonstrate a drastic decrease in parking search duration without sacrificing the tolerable system latency level. The seamless integration of ChirpPark into new and pre-existing smart mobility systems, along with high-energy sustainable solutions, is an imperative move towards green urban mobility. This integration aids in minimising the environmental footprint and enhancing the quality of life within the smart city context.