Designing and Prototyping Utility Management Using Hybrid Wireless-Wired Network Technologies

Due to the increased dependency on fusion of heterogeneous technologies, there is an increased demand for better provisioning of utility services such as electricity, water, and telecommunication, from end- users. Such demand has put more pressure to preserve the over-utilized natural resources such as water, energy, and RF spectrum. Energy and water are the precious key resources provided to us in direct or indirect forms. Particularly, water is a fundamental ingredient for any living organism and the electrical energy is one of the most sought-after resources for various activities that are happening on Earth. Unfortunately, both of these resources are vulnerable to becoming rare entities in the near future due to various factors such as deforestation, global warming, improper distribution, and undetected waste. Hence, there is a strong requirement at different levels to preserve or save these two resources. In this article, we propose low-cost hybrid network architecture, named as Learning Automata-Based Architecture for Utility Management (LAUM) that attempts to satisfy the above issues to large extent. The application of Learning Automata (LA) reduces the overall design complexity by downsizing the hardware and software resource requirements. Moreover, LAUM facilitates hassle-free deployment. This paper also presents a cost-effective implementation of a smart campus network, based on LAUM to manage utility services within the campus.