  How to efficiently design a communication network is a paramount task for
network designing and engineering. It is, however, not a single objective
optimization process as perceived by most previous researches, i.e., to
maximize its transmission capacity, but a multi-objective optimization process,
with lowering its cost to be another important objective. These two objectives
are often contradictive in that optimizing one objective may deteriorate the
other. After a deep investigation of the impact that network topology, node
capability scheme and routing algorithm as well as their interplays have on the
two objectives, this letter presents a systematic approach to achieve a
cost-effective design by carefully choosing the three designing aspects. Only
when routing algorithm and node capability scheme are elegantly chosen can
BA-like scale-free networks have the potential of achieving good tradeoff
between the two objectives. Random networks, on the other hand, have the
built-in character for a cost-effective design, especially when other aspects
cannot be determined beforehand.
