Optimal locations of switches and interconnections for ATM LANs

Setting up an ATM LAN with such equipment as ATM switches and cables is known to be of high price. The setup cost can be minimized with optimal design while providing the required bandwidths for all demand pairs to maintain the quality of service (QoS) requirement. In this paper, we suggest a combined optimization problem for determining optimal locations of switches, interconnections, and their capacities which can be utilized in designing ATM LAN. Two integer programming (IP) formulations are provided for the optimal network design problem. Also, the well-known Lagrangean relaxation technique is applied to solve the IP formulations. With the algorithms, we can also obtain time-efficiency as well as upper and lower bounds of the optimal objective value. To validate our design approach, various test examples are shown. High-quality solutions for ATM LANs with average error range of about 2.2% are generated.Scope and purposeLocal area networks (LANs) have been widely used all around the world. Recently, the service demand of users is remarkably increasing while the hardware such as a switch with high performance is coming into the world. To accommodate the service demand while maintaining a quality-of-service (QoS) level, ATM technology has been suggested and studied for an improved future communications network. As an interim solution for the improvement, the idea that applies ATM technology to the existing LAN is proposed. The prices of network components such as ATM switches and links in an ATM LAN are known to be much higher than that of the conventional LAN systems. Focused on the characteristics of the high performance and future ATM technology, we study the cost-effective design of an ATM LAN.