Many organizations would like to use the Internet for applications that require real time service, such as telephony. The Internet has not lent itself to such service in the past, but various products, services, and standards could help solve the Internet's quality-of-service problem.

Given a graph G and a (multi-)set of pairs of vertices in it, the classical NP-hard maximum edge-disjoint-paths problem (MDP) is to connect as many of the given pairs as possible using pairwise edge-disjoint paths in G. We study a relative of this problem: we have a network with fixed link capacities that may have to service large demands when necessary. In particular, individual demands are allowed to exceed capacities, and thus flows for some request pairs necessarily have to be split into different flow-paths. This is the framework for computational problems arising from: (i) electrical power networks due to the proposed deregulation of the electric utility industry in the USA, and (ii) applications such as real-time Internet services (e.g., telephone, fax, video). We show that these problems come in a few variants, some efficiently solvable and many NP-hard; we also present approximation algorithms for many of the NP-hard variants presented. Some of our approximation algorithms benefit from certain improved tail estimates that we derive; the latter also yield improved approximations for a family of packing integer programs.

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In search of real-time Internet service

Low-Bandwidth Routing and Electrical Power Networks

The use of computers in the home is continuing to grow and the integration of services between the television and the computer is blurring the definition of the two types of device and the services that they provide. This paper looks at the use of the Internet for broadcasting with particular reference to the issues behind the provision of relevant infrastructures, and appropriate software, access mechanisms, protocols and working practices. In addition it will look into the similarities and differences between the traditional broadcast medium and the use of the Internet for live events.

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Infrastructure issues for internet broadcasting to home-based users

We study the complexity of various combinatorial problems arising in the context of production and transmission of electric power. The problems studied here are motivated by the recent shift towards deregulating the electric power industry. These problems are natural NP-hard generalizations of the single (multi)-commodity flow problems. A prototypical problem arising in this context a network with fixed link capacities that may have to service large demands when necessary. In particular, individual demands are allowed to exceed capacities, and thus flows for some request pairs necessarily have to be split into different flow-paths.

In search of real-time Internet service

Citations

Low-Bandwidth Routing and Electrical Power Networks

Infrastructure issues for internet broadcasting to home-based users

Combinatorial Problems Arising in Deregulated Electrical Power Industry: Survey and Future Directions

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