The book is remarkable in the scope of material covered and depth of treatment while remaining faithful to its central theme, which is to bridge the gap between what is achievable through mathematical methods and what is actually used in practice. The development and exposition follow a methodical approach, beginning with simple cases, then systematically adding features as they arise in practice, leading the reader through a series of steps to a deeper understanding of the more complex and realistic cases found in real applications.

The book is well organized in three parts as follows. Part I, Introductory Network Design, consists of three chapters. The first chapter describes the basic notions and concepts of telecommunication and computer network modeling and design by analogies with similar issues arising in airline networks. This approach readily enables a layman to gain a quick appreciation of issues involved in communication network design as it ties the subject matter to his/her prior direct experience. Chapter 2 introduces different formulations of multicommodity flow models and illustrates applications to simple network design examples that are further extended and elaborated on in Parts II and III. Chapter 3 grounds the approach in reality by applying it to several existing and emerging technologies including IP, SONET/SDH, ATM, MPLS, WDM, and IP over SONET. Part II, Design Modeling and Methods, addresses the fundamental problems of designing single-layer networks, where all network elements are in the working state. The development of the node-arc and arc-path multicommodity flow for-