The cost-constrained web replica placement design in computer networks - an approximate approach

Paper deals with the resource replication problem which often must be solved in wide area network design process. It is important especially for big wide area networks, in which huge amount of data is exchanged between users and servers. Then replication of resources (for example servers) may prevent decreasing the quality of service in the network. Connecting replica to a node of the network is connected with some connecting cost. In practice, the connecting costs are often limited. Then, in the paper, an approximate algorithm for simultaneous serverpsilas replication, capacity and flow assignment problem with limited cost of connecting replica to the nodes of WAN is presented. Important and useful part of the paper are the results of computational experiments performed with the proposed algorithm. Important properties of the considered problem have been described. They may be helpful for planning and optimizing of WAN. Analysis of quality of the approximate solutions is also reported in the paper.