Publication

Abstract : The paper presents a method for designing a hierarchical network that maintains the desired index of service at different levels of the hierarchy, from a set of geographically distributed nodes. First, an optimization problem is proposed to obtain the optimum number of clusters and optimum number of nodes in the clusters. Next, the members of a cluster are identified and then clusters are formed by using a clustering algorithm, considering the geographical location of each node. The cost optimization procedure and the clustering algorithm are repeated until we obtain a network hierarchy. This is illustrated by a set of problems.