Opportunistic Reclustering: An Approach to Improve the Network Performance

Most of the enterprise information networks (EIN) have faced challenges during tough economic time. Especially during the economical slow growth, it causes the enterprises to tighten their belts in all areas of spending, including network maintenance. Here, we have viewed EIN as a flexible topology, where each node in EIN seeks the opportunity to join a cluster with high association with its nodes. Thus, EIN characterizes as an opportunistic network from physical infrastructure, where the topology is viewed as an opportunistic topology. By opportunistic topology, we exploit the short-term knowledge of current traffic flow among nodes at the backbone to change the existing topology. We have proposed few redesign operations to change the existing topology into an opportunistic topology. We have proposed a new factor called an opportunistic factor ranging from +1 to -1, to measure the change in traffic at the backbone before and after the redesign operations. We have modeled the opportunistic clustering as an optimization problem and utilized Simulated Annealing to search for the best opportunistic topology for the given EIN. Our simulation results reveal with positive opportunistic factor 0.4 to 0.7 in move operation and 0.05 to 0.1 in swap operation that it shows gain in the available backbone bandwidth.