A heuristic algorithm for the point of presence design problem in IP networks

We propose a heuristic algorithm for the point of presence (POP) design problem in Internet protocol (IP) networks, where a POP is a node composed of several interconnected co-located routers. This problem consists of selecting the number of routers and their types, selecting the interface card types, connecting the access and the backbone links to the ports and selecting the link types between the colocated routers. A systematic set of experiments is designed to assess the performance of the proposed heuristic algorithm. The results show that quasioptimal solutions can be found with the proposed heuristic.