ABSTRACT: Long-term evolution of management information systems toward distributed processing, accompanied of late by the development of inter-organizational systems, has posed increasing demands on the networking infrastructure. Within this framework, point-to-point data communication over a network composed of various media remains the most frequent communication mode. With a large base of network infrastructure in place, the need for incremental capacity increase due to new users who join existing networks has become a recurring problem. Accommodation of new users without downgrading the quality of service that has been provided to existing users requires network capacity expansion. A method is presented for computing the least-cost expansion of link capacities (defined as the number of lines in a link) on a point-to-point path in a network, subject to the constraint on the grade of service. A polynomial-time numerical algorithm is provided, along with the results of computer experiments.
Key words and phrases: inter-organization systems, network expansion, capacity expansion, multi-link networks, point-to-point networks