Efficiently Constructing Candidate Set Of Network Topologies

Network topology significantly affects network cost, path length, link load distribution, and reliability, so we need to consider multiple criteria with different units simultaneously when designing a network's topology. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is a technique of balancing multiple criteria in order to reach a rational decision. Using AHP, we can reflect the relative importance of each criterion on the evaluation result; therefore, we have applied it to network topology evaluation in past research. When evaluating network topologies using AHP, we need to construct the set of topology candidates prior to the evaluation. However, the time required to construct this set greatly increases as the network size grows. In this paper, we propose applying a binary partition approach for constructing a topology candidate set with dramatically reduced calculation time. To reduce the calculation time, we introduce an upper limit for the total link length. Although the results of AHP are affected by introducing the upper limit of the total link length, we show that desirable topologies are still selected in AHP.