Automated design of hierarchical intranets

This paper describes the use of i-CAD, a prototype tool for automatically synthesizing application specific intranets. i-CAD is a novel intranet computer-aided design software tool, and its ultimate goal is to concurrently design hierarchical network topologies and data management (content distribution) systems for data-intensive multimedia intranets. The prototype software tool introduced here synthesizes a three-level intranet architecture that entails minimal installation cost and yet enables all an intranet's clients to perform their tasks with acceptable performance. The tool chooses network technologies (hardware resources and protocols) based on requirements specified by the user and determines the topology. An evolutionary approach is used to search the design space for a minimal cost three-level network. The experimental results for several network design problems described here indicate the effectiveness of the prototype network tool in finding good designs from a large design space in a reasonable amount of time.