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Demand for network services such as video conferencing has grown by leaps and bounds over the last several years. Muticasting is a vital part of the communication architecture. It takes into account users dropping in and out of the network in a dynamic fashion (for example, in a live social interaction setting such as internet chat rooms). Hence there is a need to quickly compute effective routing. This book presents efficient routing algorithms that are easy to implement. In addition, intractability results are presented; these describe the best possible solution that we can hope to obtain within a reasonable amount of time. This book will be useful to industry professionals in the data communication industry, who can start with the heuristics described here and develop a better approach; and to graduate students in Data Networking, Combinatorial Optimization, Approximation Algorithms and Computational Complexity. It should serve as a handy reference to academics in these fields.

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Prabhu Manyem is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Shanghai University in China. His research interests are in Combinatorial Optimization and Descriptive Complexity. He worked in Australian universities for ten years, and held visiting positions in Taiwan and the UK. He obtained his Ph.D. from North Carolina State University, USA.

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