Optimal design of signaling networks for Internet telephony

We present an approach for efficient design of a signaling network for a network of software switches supporting Internet telephony. While one may take an integer programming approach to solve this problem, it quickly becomes intractable even for modest-sized networks. Instead, our topology design uses random graphs that we show to be nearly optimal in cost, highly connected, and computationally efficient even for large networks. We then formulate a quadratic assignment problem (QAP) to map the abstract topology into the physical network to achieve optimal load balancing for given demand forecasts, which we solve using randomized heuristics. Numerical results on several example networks illustrate the performance and computational efficiency of our method. A graphical design tool has been developed based on our algorithms.