This volume contains the proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Advanced Teleservices and High-Speed Communication Architectures (IWACA '94), held in Heidelberg, Germany in September 1994. The IWACA Workshop is a platform for the exchange among researchers and developers from both the multimedia applications and the high-speed telecommunication communities. The book presents revised versions of the 36 papers accepted for presentation at the workshop. They cover several aspects of multimedia applications and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), and focus on ATM-LANs and ATM for the wide area high-performance network of the future.

High-Speed Networking for Multimedia Applications presents the latest research on the architecture and protocols for high-speed networks, focusing on communication support for distributed multimedia applications. This includes the two major issues of ATM Networking and quality of service for multimedia applications. It is to be expected that most of the bandwidth in future high-speed networks will be taken up by multimedia applications, transmitting digital audio and video. Traditional networking protocols are not suitable for this as they do not provide guaranteed bandwidth, end-to-end delay or delay jitter, nor do they have addressing schemes or routing algorithms for multicast connections. High-Speed Networking for Multimedia Applications is a collection of high quality research papers which address these issues, providing interesting and innovative solutions. It is an essential reference for engineers and computer scientists working in this area. It is also a comprehensive text for graduate students of high-speed networking and multimedia applications.

Multimedia data streams will form a major part of the new generation of applications in high-speed networks. Continuous media streams, however, require transmission with guaranteed performance. In addition, many multimedia applications will require peer-to-multipeer communication. Guaranteed performance can only be provided with resource reservation in the network, and efficient multipeer communication must be based on multicast support in the lower layers of the network. Architecture and Protocols for High-Speed Networks focuses on techniques for building the networks that will meet the needs of these multimedia applications. In particular two areas of current research interest in such communication systems are covered in depth. These are the protocol related aspects, such as switched networks, ATM, MAC layer, network and transport layer; and the services and applications. Architecture and Protocols for High-Speed Networks contains contributions from leading world experts, giving the most up-to-date research available. It is an essential reference for all professionals, engineers and researchers working in the area of high-speed networks.

The communication of information is a crucial point in the development of our future way of life. We are living more and more in an information society. Perhaps the more obvious applications are those devoted to distributed cooperative multimedia systems. In both industry and academia, people are involved in such projects. HPN'95 is an international forum where both communities can find a place for dialogues and interchanges. The conference is targeted to the new mechanisms, protocols, services and architectures derived from the need of emerging applications, as well as from the requirements of new communication environments. This workshop belongs to the series started in 1987 in Aachen (Germany), followed by Liege (Belgium) in 1988, Berlin (Germany) in 1991, Liege (Belgium) again in 1992 and Grenoble (France) in 1994. HPN'95 is the sixth event of the series sponsored by IFIP WG 6.4 and will be held at the Arxiduc Lluis Salvador building on the campus of the University of the Balearic Islands in Palma de Mallorca (Spain) from September 13 to 15.

This is the sixth conference in the series which started in 1981 in Paris, followed by conferences held in Zurich (1984), Rio de Janeirio (1987), Barcelona (1991), and Raleigh (1993). The main objective of this IFIP conference series is to provide a platform for the exchange of recent and original contributions in communications systems in the areas of performance analysis, architectures, and applications. There are many exiciting trends and developments in the communications industry, several of which are related to advances in Asynchronous Transfer Mode·(ATM), multimedia services, and high speed protocols. It is commonly believed in the communications industry that ATM represents the next generation of networking. Yet, there are a number of issues that has been worked on in various standards bodies, government and industry research and development labs, and universities towards enabling high speed networks in general and ATM networks in particular. Reflecting these trends, the technical program of the Sixth IFIP W.G. 6.3 Conference on Performance of Computer Networks consists of papers addressing a wide range of technical challenges and proposing various state of the art solutions to a subset of them. The program includes 25 papers selected by the program committee out of 57 papers submitted.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the International Symposium on Multimedia Communications and Video Coding (ISMCVC95) held October 11 - 13, 1995, at the Poly technic University in Brooklyn, New York. This Symposium was organized under the aus pices of the New York State funded Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT), in cooperation with the Communications Society and the Signal Processing Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). In preparing this book, we have summarized the topics presented in various sessions of the Symposium, including the keynote addresses, the Service Provider and Vendor Session, the Panel Discussion, as well as the twelve Technical Sessions. This summary is presented in the Introduction. 'Full papers submitted by the presenters are organized into eleven chapters, divided into three parts. Part I focuses on systems issues in multimedia communications. Part II concentrates on video coding algorithms. Part III discusses the interplay between video coding and network control for video delivery over various channels.

This book focuses on one of the most exciting aspects of the Internet: the broadcasting of multimedia content. It draws together research from projects by some of the most active and prominent research groups and individuals working in this field across the world. The text explores multimedia webcast issues such as quality technology and interface. It will be of particular interest to research groups and students in the field of internet technology, technical specialists in networks and telematics, and computer scientists involved in event broadcasts and remote skills transfer. The book is one of the first titles in our new series, Computer Communications and Networks.

Multimedia Systems discusses the basic characteristics of multimedia operating systems, networking and communication, and multimedia middleware systems. The overall goal of the book is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner: a multimedia application and its user interface must be developed in an integrated fashion with underlying multimedia middleware, operating systems, networks, security, and multimedia devices. Fundamental characteristics of multimedia operating and distributed communication systems are presented, especially scheduling algorithms and other OS supporting approaches for multimedia applications with soft-real-time deadlines, multimedia file systems and servers with their decision algorithms for data placement, scheduling and buffer management, multimedia communication, transport, and streaming protocols, services with their error control, congestion control and other Quality of Service aware and adaptive algorithms, synchronization services with their skew control methods, and group communication with their group coordinating algorithms and other distributed services.

This volume addresses fundamental design issues and research topics related to multimedia systems, and provides a comprehensive study of the issues. Topics covered include: distributed multimedia databases and computing; multiparadigmatic information retrieval; modelling and analysis of distributed multimedia systems; OS support for distributed multimedia systems; multimedia communications and networking; multimedia digital libraries and mail systems; multimedia human-computer interaction; multimedia applications for CSCW, distant education, electronic commerce teleconferencing and telemedicine; visual and multidimensional languages for multimedia applications; multimedia workflows; and multimedia stream synchronization. In addition, a number of tutorial and overview articles are included so that the volume strikes a balance between introductory tutorials and advanced topics.

Client/Server applications are of increasing importance in industry, and have been improved by advanced distributed object-oriented techniques, dedicated tool support and both multimedia and mobile computing extensions. Recent responses to this trend are standardized distributed platforms and models including the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) of the Open Software Foundation (OS F), Open Distributed Processing (ODP), and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) of the Object Management Group (OMG). These proceedings are the compilation of papers from the technical stream of the IFIPIIEEE International Conference on Distributed Platforms, Dresden, Germany. This conference has been sponsored by IFIP TC6.1, by the IEEE Communications Society, and by the German Association of Computer Science (GI -Gesellschaft fur Informatik). ICDP'96 was organized jointly by Dresden University of Technology and Aachen University of Technology. It is closely related to the International Workshop on OSF DCE in Karlsruhe, 1993, and to the IFIP International Conference on Open Distributed Processing. ICDP has been designed to bring together researchers and practitioners who are studying and developing new methodologies, tools and technologies for advanced client/server environ ments, distributed systems, and network applications based on distributed platforms.