Google open-sources network-opt for optimizing network topology

The Internet has become the most important issue for modern people besides food and clothing. From our computers to the numerous Internet servers that transmit data packets around the world, the Internet is everywhere.

Google recently open-sourced a library called network-opt on GitHub. According to the introduction, this is a library focused on optimizing network topology processing.

The structure of a network is called its topology. Network topology can be physical or logical, centralized or decentralized, and fully or partially connected.

The topology of a network is a method of referring to the relationship between points and lines that is independent of the size and shape of the topology. Computers and communication devices in the network are abstracted as a point, and the transmission medium is abstracted as a line. The geometric figure composed of points and lines is the topology of the computer network. The topology of the network reflects the structural relationship of entities in the network. It is the first step in building a computer network and the basis for implementing various network protocols. It has a significant impact on the performance of the network, the reliability of the system, and the communication cost.

If two networks have the same connection structure, we say that their network topology is the same, even though their internal physical wiring and distances between nodes may be different.

Given a network with n nodes, the number of possible topologies grows exponentially with n; even with only a dozen nodes, there are nearly a trillion possible configurations.

In the project description, Google describes network-opt as: "A C++ library that supports network topology optimization. Using sophisticated combinatorial search techniques, the algorithm can efficiently build instances from families of so-called series-parallel networks, which are commonly found in electrical and telecommunications applications."

Google Research has also published a paper on the search strategy for topological network optimization. network-opt is currently hosted on GitHub. The project is written in C++ and distributed under the Apache-2.0 protocol.

This article is reproduced from OSCHINA

Title of this article: Google open-sources network-opt for optimizing network topology

Article URL: https://www.oschina.net/news/184150/google-open-source-network-opt