Question

Imagine you are the network administrator of University X having 10 campuses in Towson, Maryland. You want to build a connected network of servers (each server is either a regular or a routing one), one at each campus, and want to choose some of them to be the designated routing servers. A routing server will serve regular servers who connect directly to it via high speed cables, and every regular server must connect to at least one routing server. Your goal is to minimize the total length of high speed cable that you must purchase. Given the geographic locations of the 10 campuses, design a plan that requires (1) the shortest length of cable and (2) the least number of routing servers

Answer 1

Since every regular serve has to be directly connected to atleast one routing server and we want least number of routing server, so we can keep only one routing server and remaining 9 severs to be regular server connected with this single routing server.

Now once we decided to keep only one routing server, we have to select that server routing server from which sum of length of high speed cable to each of the 9 servers should be minimum.

Hence our approach can be summerized by following steps:-

1. For each server from server 1 to server 10:-

2. Find the sum of length of high speed cables when a particular server is selected as routing server.

3. Select that server as routing server from which sum of length of high speed cable is minimized.

Please comment for any clarification.