Clustering schemes for network management

A communication network management structure is considered which consists of regional management centers. These centers receive fault reports from individual nodes in their region and take appropriate action based on the information gathered. The regional centers may report their information to a central management center if required. The problem of partitioning a network into a given number of regions (or clusters) is considered such that there is one management center assigned to each region and the total distance all the nodes to their assigned center is minimized. An efficient algorithm to solve this problem is presented. It is shown that the problem becomes NP-complete when there are two management centers per region with the regions being disjoint. Some heuristic solutions to this problem are also presented