A Survey on Wireless Network Applications in Automated Public Utilities Control and Management

Public utilities such as water, electricity and gas are essential services that play a vital role in economic and social development. Automation of public utility services addresses the huge losses faced by the utility services today, due to non-accounting of distributed utility resources. Automation improves government revenues. The different type of architectures are proposed and designed for automated metering, control and management of public utilities like water, gas, and electricity for effective management and control of resources. The various network topologies, hardware and software architectures to automation and management of public utilities are proposed by researchers. In this paper, the different technologies proposed by various researchers across the globe are surveyed and list of issues and challenges for automated meter reading and control of public utilities is identified.