OPTIMAL NETWORK PARTITIONING FOR FAULT-TOLERANT NETWORK MANAGEMENT USING EVOLUTIONARY PROGRAMMING

This paper explores the applicability of clustering methods for obtain ing an optimal partition of a network. In order to make the network ma nagement fault-tolerant, more than one management center is assigned t o each cluster of nodes in the partition. Gradient descent partition m ethods converge to locally optimal partitions. In contrast, a stochast ic search method called evolutionary programming is employed to search for a globally optimal partition that minimizes the communication cos t.