Modern Computer Communication Networks are having a profound impact on individuals and society, the demand for higher capacity and faster networking services to the home are increasing significantly over time. This is known as the last mile problem, how to bring broadband communication services to the home at reasonable costs. Several technologies have been developed to provide such services to the end user: They include cable modems and wideband services through the cable TV infrastructure, wireless services through the cellular and wireless based systems and DSL/ADSL and its different variants that is based on extensions of the existing wire based phone system.
The different technologies and the analysis of their advantages and disadvantages will be presented. Most of the technologies rely on the existing local TV cable or phone network to provide services to the home. In order to deploy the technologies efficiently in the local service system efficient algorithms have to be developed to solve existing and new combinatorial optimization problems on tree based networks. We will present several of those problems and highlight results obtained to some of them.
Open problems and extensions will be discussed.