System survivability is the ability to give service in spite of failures of some of the components. To assure survivability is an important goal when designing a communications network backbone, to ensure that it can resist to failures in the switch sites as well as in the connection lines. Previous work has employed a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP), based on path algorithms, to build low cost network topologies which comply with heterogeneous node-connectivity requirements, which can model the survivability goals. In this work, we present another variant of the GRASP procedure, based on a tree search, which obtains good results in topologies with a large number of switch nodes.