AN EDGE-BASED HEURISTIC FOR STEINER ROUTING

A new approximation heuristic for finding a rectilinear Steiner tree o f a set of nodes is presented. It starts with a rectilinear minium spa nning tree of the nodes and repeatedly connects a node to the nearest point on the rectangular layout of an edge, removing the longest edge of the loop thus formed. A simple implementation of the heuristic usin g conventional data structures is compared with previously existing al gorithms. The performance (i.e., quality of the route produced) or our algorithm is as good as the best reported algorithm, while the runnin g time is an order of magnitude better than that of this best algorith m. It is also shown that the asymptotic time complexity for the algori thm can be improved to O(n log n), where n is the number of points in the set.