Cost-effective placement of functionality in telecommunication system design

Traditionally, the performance of a distributed system or a telecommunication network is taken into account only in the last step of its design and is seen as a final improvement. Recent attempts to incorporate performance considerations in the mainstream design rely on the development of a functional model consisting of entities that must be optimally distributed over a network of physical nodes. In this paper we start from a rather informal methodology and refine it in order to convert it into a rather strict and well-defined method, taking into account the various parameters that influence the system design and emphasizing mainly a cost-effective placement of functionality in the physical nodes. © 1998 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.