Yener Bulent author Columbia University. Computer Science Boult Terrance E. author Columbia University. Computer Science Columbia University. Computer Science originator contributor text Technical reports New York Department of Computer Science, Columbia University 1994 This paper presents a new method for computing the lower bounds for multihop network design problems which is particularly well suited to optical networks. More specifically, given N stations each with d transceivers and pairwise average traffic values of the stations, the method provides a lower bound for the combined problem of finding optimum (i) allocation of wavelengths to the stations to determine a configuration, and (ii) routing of the traffic on this configuration while minimizing congestion - defined as the maximum flow assigned on any link. The lower bounds can be computed in time polynomial in the network size. Consequently, the results in this work yield a tool which can be used in (i) evaluating the quality of heuristic design algorithms, and (ii) determining a termination criteria during minimization. The lower bound computation is based on first building flow trees to find a lower bound on the total flow, and then distributing the total flow over the links to minimize the congestion. Computer science CUCS-006-94 http://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:12381 English NNC NNC 2012-01-27 15:23:35 -0500 2012-02-17 09:34:08 -0500 6377 eng