Placing Servers for Session-Oriented Services

The provisioning of dynamic forms of services is becoming the main stream of today\u27s network. In this paper, we focus on services assisted by network servers and different forms of associated sessions. We identify two types of services: transparent, where the session is unaware of the server location, and configurable, where the sessions need to be configured to use their closest server. For both types we formalize the problem of optimally placing network servers and introduce approximated solutions. We present simulation result of approximations and heuristics. We also solve the location problem optimally for a special topology. We show, through a series of examples, that our approaches can be applied to a variety of different services