Patent ID: 7756062

Claim:
A method of determining a staged topology for a communication network including a plurality of nodes, said method comprising: executing computer readable program code with a processing device to enable said processing device to perform the steps of: identifying a plurality of topologies comprising different subsets of available communication links among the nodes; and generating a staged topology for the network, wherein the staged topology comprises a sequence of two or more of the identified topologies and wherein information is communicatable among the nodes within the network via communication links arranged in accordance with the topologies included in the staged topology, wherein said generating comprises: associating a connection matrix with each identified topology, wherein the connection matrix associated with each topology includes a plurality of numerical elements c ij , indexed by row i and column j where i represents the first of a pair of nodes in the network and j represents the second of a pair of nodes in the network, and wherein each numerical element c ij is a first value when there is a communication link between node i and node j and is a second value otherwise; establishing one or more sequences of topologies using the identified topologies; multiplying the connection matrices associated with the topologies in each sequence of topologies to obtain a sequenced connection matrix corresponding with each sequence of topologies; determining which sequences of topologies produce a fully connected communication network by determining which sequences of topologies have corresponding sequenced connection matrices without any second value elements; choosing only the sequenced connection matrices corresponding with the sequences of topologies that produce a fully connected communication network for further consideration; multiplying each sequenced connection matrix by a weighting matrix to obtain a total cost matrix corresponding with each sequence of topologies, wherein the weighting matrix includes a plurality of numerical elements w ij , indexed by row i and column j where i represents the first of a pair of nodes in the network and j represents the second of a pair of nodes in the network, and wherein each numerical element w ij represents a relative cost associated with a communication link from node i to node j; and selecting one of the sequences of topologies as the staged topology based on the total cost matrices corresponding with each sequence of topologies.