Topological Design of Computer Communication Networks Using Simulated Annealing

This paper presents an application of the simulated annealing heuristic to the problem of designing computer communication networks. This problem essentially consists in finding the least-cost network topologies that satisfies a given set of performance and reliability constraints. The results of the computational experiments show that simulated annealing is a suitable approach for solving this very difficult combinatorial optimization problem, in the sense that it provides feasible and low-cost solutions within reasonable CPU times.