Optimal transmission lines assignment in a multi-source multi-sink computer network

For a multi-source multi-sink computer network with fixed network topology, how to assign the transmission lines to the arcs to provide a certain level of network reliability is an important problem worthy of studying. Considering the assignment cost, this paper investigates the optimal transmission lines assignment problem with minimal assignment cost. At the same time, the data transferring reliability between any pair of source node and sink node should not be smaller than a certain reliability threshold. In order to solve the proposed problem, we first propose an assignment cost calculation algorithm under the reliabilities constraints for a transmission lines configuration. Then we adopt the genetic algorithm to search for the optimal solution. Experiments are conducted to illustrate the proposed algorithm. The experiment results show that the proposed algorithm can provide efficient solution in a reasonable time.