Network topology design with multiple criteria

The physical or logical topology of a network seriously affects the network cost, reliability, throughput, and traffic pattern, etc, so we need to consider these multiple criteria having different units, simultaneously. However, ordinary methods of designing network topology consider only a single criterion, e.g., minimizing the required number of physical links. In this paper, we propose a network topology design method using "average rank", which is calculated by averaging the ranks of all criteria. This method requires little calculation and the principle of topology evaluation is really simple. Through numerical evaluation, we show that this method can find network topologies with reasonable values of all the criteria.