Title: Efficient Algorithms for Optimization of Multicast Networks on the Internet


Carlos A.S. Oliveira and Panos M. Pardalos
Industrial and Systems Engineering 
University of Florida
oliveira@ufl.edu and pardalos@cao.ise.ufl.edu


Abstract:
Multicast networking is a type of routing technique that can be
used to connect one source of data to multiple destinations.
A multicast network implements one or more multicast routing protocols
to serve users interested on cooperative applications.
The number of such applications have increased steadily
in the last few years, incorporating areas such as financial data,
software development, virtual conference and multimedia.

One of the main problems in this area is the efficient determination of 
routes from a node in the network to a set of users, also called the 
{\em multicast group}.
A second interesting problem concerns the determination of the minimum
number of multicast routers needed to implement the multicast routing,
given a set of capacity constraints on the network links.

In this talk, we discuss both problems and some of the recent work developed 
on this area. We present new formulations, and give both approximation as 
well as heuristic algorithms for the problems above. We also present some 
computational results of the approaches used.