Two stage heuristic for designing data communication networks

Abstract

In this paper, we present a two-stage heuristic which identifies the most economical way to connect the nodes of a date communication network. We formulate this network design problem as a star-star concentrator location problem. To solve this problem, a Lagrangin relaxation procedure is proposed. The first stage of the procedure, namely the solution to the relaxed problem, identifies the optimal locations of the transit nodes. Then a greedy type heuristic, as well as an optimal procedure are used to identify the linkage of these transit nodes to the other nodes. Computational results are provided and the results are also compared with another method.