ZTE has launched a new solution aimed at helping venues provide smart parking and indoor navigation services for cars.
The Indoor Intelligent Navigation, Smart Car Seeking solution combines connectivity, IoT sensors and multi-access edge computing (MEC) capabilities to allow navigation, smart car finding and other services to be extended into underground and indoor parking garages.
The service is powered by ZTE’s QCell small cell solution, which aims to further operators’ coverage indoors and also provides various auxiliary services such as analytics.
The QCell detects and reports approaching cars to the MEC system, which then triggers the indoor navigation system and provides drivers with parking space reservation services and route planning.
The solution can also record a vehicle’s specific location through the magnetic IoT sensors in the parking spaces. A driver can then use an app to find their vehicle within the car park complex.
ZTE said it hopes to extend the solution to third party developers and content providers to open up further location based services, which would also be powered by the MEC.
The solution has already been deployed in the Zhangjiang ZTE Intelligent Park, with ZTE demonstrating the services to attendees at MWC Shanghai.
In February, ZTE launched a smart parking system powered by NB-IoT which combines an IoT data unit and operations platform with a mobile app to link drivers with available parking spaces in a city.
A unit is installed in the parking space that uses magnetic fields to ascertain whether a parking space is occupied.