通信网络设计: 传输容量、设计代价和可扩展性

Abstract

Despite the growing number of works centering around the traffic dynamics on complex networks, these researches still have some common shortcomings, e.g., too simple traffic flow model and lack of considerations for the designing cost and scalability issues. This paper builds on a more realistic traffic flow model, and offers a holistic view on the network designing problem. In addition to the extensively studied transmission capacity, this paper takes designing cost and scalability as two other designing objectives, and presents a quantitative study of how different designing choices independently and collectively influence these objectives by the introduction of a cartesian coordinate system. It is shown that different kinds of network topologies display different shapes of achievable solution spaces and exhibit different abilities to achieve cost-effective and scalable designing. In particular, we find the philosophy underlying empirical network designing and engineering today fails to meet the cost-effective and scalable designing requirements, and propose a cost-effective and scalable designing scheme for BA-like networks, i.e., the efficient routing combined with effective betweenness based link bandwidth allocation. In addition, when designing a thoroughly new network from the beginning, we find that ER network is a good candidate to achieve cost-effective and scalable designing in most settings.