We study client-server data caching, both with and without expiration timestamps, to assess its applicability to present and future telecommunications services such as local number portability, toll-free numbers, and mobile telephony. We perform simulation studies to evaluate the empirical performance of a variety of strategies for caching in a client-server setting. Data caching at client locations is found to be an economical and scalable approach to support future data-intensive telecommunications services.

This paper provides a very simple two-approximation algorithm for two NP-hard problems that arise in electronic circuit design. To our knowledge, this is the best approximation bound known for these problems. In addition, the simplicity of the proposed algorithm makes it attractive for real-time applications for similar problems in areas such as telecommunications and parallel processing.