A system for routing and capacity assignment in computer communication networks

The combined problem of selecting a primary route for each communicating pair and a capacity value for each link in computer communication networks is considered. The network topology and traffic characteristics are given: a set of candidate routes and of candidate capacities for each link are also available. The goal is to obtain the least costly feasible design where the costs include both capacity and queuing components. Lagrangean relaxation and subgradient optimization techniques were used to obtain verifiable solutions to the problem. The method was tested on several topologies, and in all cases good feasible solutions, as well as tight lower bounds, were obtained. The model can be generalized to deal with different classes of customers, characterized by different priorities, message lengths, and/or delay requirements