Abstract
Various computing servers are springing up all over the Internet. These servers are used by client computers for different information retrieval purposes. The location of such servers has a direct impact on the networking cost associated with requests and replies to and from the servers (e.g., bandwidth and processing power costs). Badly placed servers result in an unnecessary cost that can be avoided by a better placement strategy. This paper introduces the network server problem and presents an algorithm that can be used for selecting least-cost assignment of the servers, based on the number of hosts in the network, their load, and the number of hops data packets traverse from host to server. We develop a mathematical model for this problem and suggest a solution procedure for the developed model. Computational experiments show that the proposed algorithm offers an attractive performance.