Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2004
The problem of minimizing the maximum edge congestion in a multicastcommunication network generalizes the well-known NP-hard multicommodityflow problem. We give the presently best theoretical approximation results aswell as efficient implementations. In particular we show that for a networkwith m edges and k multicast requests, anr(1 + ε)(rOPT + exp(1)lnm)-approximation can be computed inO(kmε-2 lnklnm) time, where β bounds the time forcomputing an r-approximate minimum Steiner tree. Moreover, we present a newfast heuristic that outperforms the primal-dual approaches with respect toboth running time and objective value.