An evolutionary approach for configuring economical packet switched computer networks

摘要

The topological design of computer networks essentially consists in finding a network topology which minimizes the communication costs, taking into account some constraints such as performance and quality of service. This optimization problem is well known as difficult to solve, such that only heuristic methods are usually recommended and used. These methods are incremental in the sense that they take a starting topology as input solution and perturb it in order to produce a better solution. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary approach, based on the genetic algorithm paradigm, for solving this problem. Simulation results confirm the appropriateness and efficiency of this approach which yields solutions of very good quality for moderate size networks.