AIT graduate Dr. Areeyata Sripetch received the
second-level award from the Thailand Research Fund (TRF)
for her doctoral thesis “Design of DWDM Networks for Power
Utilities”. The awards are intended for Thai nationals who
graduate with doctoral degrees. Dr. Areeyata Sripetch recently
graduated from the telecommunications field of study at the
School of Engineering and Technology.
Five theses received top-level TRF awards this year, while 17
were awarded second-level awards. Dr. Areeyata’s thesis
was one of two to earn second-level award distinction in
the category of Engineering and Industrial Research. One thesis was
awarded the top-level award. Dr. Areeyata was an advisee of
Dr. Poompat Saengudomlert,
who is an Assistant Professor of telecommunications.
Her award-winning doctoral thesis considers a power utility
company that tried to implement a communication backbone network whose
links are optical fibers inside overhead ground wires on a power
grid. Since power grid networks can often reach rural areas where
other types of infrastructure networks cannot, implementing
communication networks on top of power grids can serve as an effective
means to reduce the digital divide between urban and rural
environments.
The thesis provided a systematic approach (based on the optimization
framework) to find a suitable communication backbone network topology
that contained a set of nodes located at a subset of power
substations. The result topology is computed such that each
source-destination node pair is still connected, even though there is a
link or node failure in the network.
In addition to topology design, the thesis provided a
solution-approach to computing routes and assigning wavelengths
for traffic connections, taking into account the presence of optical
amplifiers and physical layer constraints such as end-to-end
signal-to-noise ratios.
The design-approach proposed in this thesis was applied to a
realistic scenario based on the power grid topology of the Electricity
Generation Authority of Thailand (EGAT).