Design of computer network topologies: A Vroom Inspired Psychoclonal Algorithm

In the prevailing era of network and communication technology, the problem pertaining to the determination of the most economic way to interconnect nodes while satisfying some reliability and quality of service constraints has been agnized as one of the most intricate and challenging problem for the modern day researchers and practitioners belonging to Communication and Networking community. Motivated by the improved performance of the concepts like proliferation, affinity maturation, receptor editing, etc., over the more prevalent generalized crossover and mutation; and by the application and effectiveness of Maslow’s need hierarchy in combinatorial optimization as well the more logical motivational concepts provided by Vroom’s valence expectancy theory, authors have proposed and investigated their applications to the topological design of distributed packet switched networks. The extensive computations over the problems of varying complexities and dimensions prove the superiority of the proposed methodology. It has been observed that the proposed Vroom Inspired Psychoclonal Algorithm (VIPA) outperforms the traditional well established random search algorithms (i.e. Genetic Algorithm, Simulated Annealing and Artificial Immune Systems) in the context of underlying problem; the performance being significantly improved as the problem complexity increases.