  Parking sensor network is rapidly deploying around the world and is regarded
as one of the first implemented urban services in smart cities. To provide the
best network performance, the MAC protocol shall be adaptive enough in order to
satisfy the traffic intensity and variation of parking sensors. In this paper,
we study the heavy-tailed parking and vacant time models from SmartSantander,
and then we apply the traffic model in the simulation with four different kinds
of MAC protocols, that is, contention-based, schedule-based and two hybrid
versions of them. The result shows that the packet interarrival time is no
longer heavy-tailed while collecting a group of parking sensors, and then
choosing an appropriate MAC protocol highly depends on the network
configuration. Also, the information delay is bounded by traffic and MAC
parameters which are important criteria while the timely message is required.
