Load Forecasting Technique for System Expansion in Isolated Area Using Time Invariant Socio-Economic Factors of Identical Agglomerations

Load forecasting is a critical issue for operational planning as well as grid expansion to ensure an uninterruptable electric power system. Being a small but densely populated country in South Asia, Bangladesh has many isolated places which are not connected to national grid yet. If concern authority opts to expand grid to those areas, they need reliable demand data for designing and dimensioning of different power system entities, e.g., capacity, overhead line capacity, tie line capacity, spinning reserve, load-shedding scheduling, etc., for reliable operation and to prevent possible obligatory redesigning. This paper represents an analysis to forecast the electricity demand of an isolated island in Bangladesh where past history of electrical load demand is not available. The analysis is based on the identification of factors, e.g., population, literacy rate, per capita income, occupation, communication, etc., on which electrical load growth of an area depends. Data has been collected from the targeted isolated area and form a grid connected area which is similar to target area from social and geographical perspective. Weights of those factors on load have been calculated by matrix inversion. Demand of the new area is forecasted using these weights factors by matrix multiplication.

Analysis of Mobile and Internet Network Coverage: Propagation of Electromagnetic Waves and Concept of Digital Divide in Burundi

Mobile and Internet network coverage plays an important role in digital transformation and the exploitation of new services. The evolution of mobile networks from the first generation (1G) to the 5th generation is still a long process. 2G networks have developed the messaging service, which complements the already operational voice service. 2G technology has rapidly progressed to the third generation (3G), incorporating multimedia data transmission techniques. It then progressed to fourth generation (4G) and LTE (Long Term Evolution), increasing the transmission speed to improve 3G. Currently, developed countries have already moved to 5G. In developing countries, including Burundi, a member of the East African Community (ECA) where more than 80% are connected to 2G technologies, 40% are connected to the 3G network and 25% to the 4G network and are not yet connected to the 5G network and then still a process. The objective of this article is to analyze the coverage of 2G, 3G and 4G networks in Burundi. This analysis will make it possible to identify possible deficits in order to reduce the digital divide between connected urban areas and remote rural areas. Furthermore, this analysis will draw the attention of decision-makers to the need to deploy networks and coverage to allow the population to access mobile and Internet services and thus enable the digitalization of the population. Finally, this article shows the level of coverage, the digital divide and an overview of the deployment of base stations (BTS) throughout the country to promote the transformation and digital inclusion of services.

Detecting Isolate Safe Areas in Wireless Sensor Monitoring Systems

Wireless sensors are deployed widely to monitor space, emergent events, and disasters. Collected realtime sensory data are precious for completing rescue missions quickly and efficiently. Detecting isolate safe areas is significant for various applications of event and disaster monitoring since valuable real-time information can be provided for the rescue crew to save persons who are trapped in isolate safe areas. We propose a centralized method to detect isolate safe areas via discovering holes in event areas. In order to shorten the detection delay, a distributed isolate safe area detection method is studied. The distributed method detects isolate safe areas during the process of event detection. Moreover, detecting isolate safe areas in a building is addressed particularly since the regular detecting method is not applicable. Our simulation results show that the distributed method can detect all isolate safe areas in an acceptable short delay.