Routeing in a Network with Multi-Class Links

Consider a communication network with certain nodes and different types of links. In addition to the normal link cost, a transformation cost is charged if the incoming link and the outgoing link are of different types. An optimal routeing from a given node to its destination node is sought. The major difficulty in handling this problem is that the principle of optimality does not hold. A model with node separation is built to overcome this difficulty. By using the new model, the original routeing problem is no more than a shortest-path problem. Hence, we can implement this model to current electronic switching machines.