This is a Research Planning Grant for women who have nt had prior independent Federal research. The award is allowing the PI to develop a research program in the area of multicast communications for highly parallel computing systems. The planning activities are concentrated on the investigation of routing contronl strategies for multicast networks from the following aspects: 1) designing new routing control strategies which can more effectively reduce the non-uniformity of multicast connections; 2) developing a network simulator to simulate the multicast networks under these routing control strategies, and gather a large amount of statistical performance data to compare different control strategies and guide the theoretical analysis in the later phase of the research systems.