Article ID: | iaor20113263 |
Volume: | 217 |
Issue: | 12 |
Start Page Number: | 5338 |
End Page Number: | 5346 |
Publication Date: | Feb 2011 |
Journal: | Applied Mathematics and Computation |
Authors: | Wille Emilio Carlos Gomes, Yabcznski Eduardo, Lopes Heitor Silvrio |
Keywords: | heuristics |
This paper presents a design methodology for IP networks under end‐to‐end Quality‐of‐Service (QoS) constraints. Particularly, we consider a more realistic problem formulation in which the link capacities of a general‐topology packet network are discrete variables. This Discrete Capacity Assignment (DCA) problem can be classified as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem. A refined TCP/IP traffic modeling technique is also considered in order to estimate performance metrics for networks loaded by realistic traffic patterns. We propose a discrete variable Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) procedure to find solutions for the problem. A simple approach called Bottleneck Link Heuristic (BLH) is also proposed to obtain admissible solutions in a fast way. The PSO performance, compared to that one of an exhaustive search (ES) procedure, suggests that the PSO algorithm provides a quite efficient approach to obtain (near) optimal solutions with small computational effort.