Network Topology Design Using Analytic Hierarchy Process

The topology of a network seriously affects its cost, reliability, throughput, and traffic pattern, etc, so we need to simultaneously consider these multiple criteria, which have different units, when evaluating network topologies. Moreover, we need to reflect the relative importance of each criterion when evaluating the network topology. However, ordinary methods of network topology design consider only a single criterion. In this paper, we apply AHP (analytic hierarchy process), which has been widely used when making a rational decision with multiple criteria, to network topology design. AHP enables us to reflect the relative importance of each criterion on the results. In network topology design, we need to consider a huge number of candidates, and the differences in the weights among candidates are small. Therefore, the optimum topologies will be determined by just the weighted criteria, and other criteria will not be considered. Therefore, to emphasize the difference of the weights, we propose to use a linear-transformed value of each criterion when constructing weights in AHP.