An Algorithm for Technology Choice in Local Area Network Design

Technological advances in both the manufacturing and office sectors have emphasized the need to link processors and communications equipment into Local Area Networks (LANs) to facilitate communication and promote resource sharing. Interviews with designers and users of LANs revealed that a primary problem in the acquisition of a LAN is making technology choices in a cost effective manner when the available technologies and their costs are constantly changing. Since no standards for technology choice currently exist and user demand is expected to increase, system flexibility is also an important concern. The problem of technology choice is formulated as a dynamic integer program. Because of the numerous combinations of technology and network configuration pairings, the Sweeney-Tatham reduction method is utilized to reduce the problem to a computationally tractable size. Finally, the formation is applied to the actual case of an institutional user seeking to network 29 buildings. The resulting reduced problem can be solved on a microcomputer as a shortest path problem.