Designing rural area telecommunication networks via hub cities

Rural areas provide an interesting laboratory for experimenting with technological advances in telecommunication networks. Rural telecommunications becomes an emerging infrastructure to improve rural services. This paper presents a decision support framework for designing such a rural area network. Rural residential areas are organized around a set of service centers called hub cities. The Analytic Hierarchy Process is employed to use conflicting multiple criteria in measuring the relative importance of information services available via hub candidates. Based on the resulting analysis, hub cities are selected so that overall utility of telecommunication networks can be maximized by using an integer programming technique. A prototype for the state of Nebraska is built to demonstrate the applicability of the two-phased decision support system in real-life situations.