Replicated Server Placement with QoS Constraints

The network planning problem of placing replicated servers with QoS constraints is considered. Each server site may consist of multiple server types with varying capacities and each site can be placed in any location among those belonging to a given set. Each client can be served by more than one location as long as the round-trip delay of data requests satisfies predetermined upper bounds. Our main focus is to minimize the cost of using the servers and utilizing the link bandwidth, while serving requests according to their delay constraint. This is an NP-hard problem. A pseudopolynomial and a polynomial algorithm that provide guaranteed approximation factors with respect to the optimal for the problem at hand are presented