It is time to tell you more about the project for the course.
As you will discover as you read the material for the course further, there is a complex but reasonable process for designing a network: you identify the various nodes that will want to send traffic to other
nodes and estimate the amount of traffic each node will want to send (the "offered load"). You try to work out a reasonable topology of links connecting those nodes. You try to assign capacities
to those links that will allow that traffic to be handled. You try to optimize those capacities on the basis of a minimal cost for a given delay. Then you perturb the topoogy and try again. The main tool for the topology design is the Ford-Fulkerson max-flow-min-cut algorithm. The main tool for capacity optimization is the Kleinrock approximation. Those two tools are the hard part of the course.
Since the methodology is well-established, you project is primarily one of identifying some reasonable realistic network design problem to which to apply it. The last class that did this decided to all get together and redesign the LIRR. They did pretty well.
No comments:
Post a Comment