Topological Design of Multipoint Teleprocessing Networks

This paper is concerned with the problem of designing a minimum-cost network of acceptable performance that connects several remote terminals to a central processor using multidrop lines. It is assumed that the message generation rate at each of the terminals is known and that the communication lines of the network have the same capacity. A simple model of the network is used to derive performance constraints for the design procedure. A new heuristic design procedure is proposed. This procedure is compared to other heuristic methods and is found superior in some cases. An improved version of the branch-and-bound (BB) algorithm of Chandy and Russell is developed and tested.