In hot-potato (deflection) routing, nodes in the network have no buffers for packets in transit, which causes conflicting packets to be deflected away from their destinations. We study one-to-many batch routing problems on arbitrary tree topologies. We present two hot-potato routing algorithms, one deterministic and one randomized, whose routing times are asymptotically near-optimal (within pol...

Group communication protocols support the ordered and reliable delivery of messages to multiple destinations in a group of processes. The group communication protocols discussed so far assume that the delay time between every two processes is almost the same. In world-wide applications using the Internet, it is essential to consider a wide-area group where the delay times among the processes ar...

Is it possible for humans to navigate in the natural environment wherein the path taken between various destinations is ‘optimal’ in some way? In the domain of optimization this challenge is traditionally framed as the “Traveling Salesman Problem” (TSP). What strategies and ecological considerations are plausible for human navigation? When given a twodimensional map-like presentation of the des...