Massimo Ancona, Walter Cazzola, Sara Drago, and Francesco Guido. An XML-Based Description of Structured Networks. In Proceedings of Interna- tional Conference Communications 2004, pages 401–406, Bucharest, Romania, June 2004. IEEE Press. An XML-Based Description of Structured Networks Massimo Ancona£ Walter Cazzola† Sara Drago£ Francesco Guido‡ £ DISI University of Genova, e-mail: fancona,
[email protected] † DICo University of Milano, e-mail:
[email protected] ‡ Marconi Selenia Communication, e-mail:
[email protected] Abstract In this paper we present an XML-based formalism to describe hierarchically organized communication networks. After a short overview of existing graph description languages, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of their application in network optimization. We conclude by extending one of these formalisms with features supporting the description of the relationship between the optimized logical layout of a network and its physical counterpart. Elements for describing traffic parameters are also given. 1 Introduction The problem of network design and optimization has a strategical importance especially for military networks. In this case, design for fault tolerance and security plays a role more and more crucial than the equivalent importance required for commercial and research networks. The reengineering of a large communication network is a complex problem, which consists of different aspects that can be strongly affected by the way of describing data. The plainest way to describe a communication network is to model the relationship among sites and links by means of a weighted undirected graph, but unless some more assumptions are taken, this approach can raise several problems. A first issue is encountered when an analysis and a visualization of the network has to be realized: practical networks include hundreds or often thousands of nodes and links, so that even a simple description and documentation of the network structure is hard to maintain and update.