An efficient heuristic methodology to design switched LANs

Present and future telecommunication networks have to integrate a great variety of services including multimedia services, which require a considerable amount of bandwidth. In this scenario, local area networks (LAN) that originally were shared medium networks had become switched networks offering a higher capacity for the links connecting switches. We propose a heuristic methodology to design the topology of a switched LAN depending on the characteristics of the integrated traffic carried by the network. The traffic is modeled as a fluid-flow generated by a group of heterogeneous on/off sources and the quality of service constraint is the information loss probability.