This volume contains the proceedings of the Fourth IFIP International Conference on Network Control and Engineering for QoS, Security and Mobility, NETCON 2005. The conference, organized by the International Federation for Information Processing, was held in Lannion, France from November 14-18, 2005. Coverage explores network security, network policy, quality of service, wireless networks, intelligent networks, and performance evaluation.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Network Control and Engineering for Quality of Service, Security and Mobility (Net-Con'2004), celebrated in Palma de Mallorca (Illes Balears, Spain) during November 2-5, 2004. This IFIP TC6 Conference was organized by the Universitat de les Illes Balears and sponsored by the following Working Groups: WG6.2 (Network and Internetwork Architectures), WG6.6 (Management of Networks and Distributed Systems), WG6.7 (Smart Networks) and WG6.8 (Mobile and Wireless Communications). The rapid evolution of the networking industry introduces new exciting challenges that need to be explored by the research community. The adoption of Internet as the global network infrastructure places the issue of quality of service among one of the hot topics nowadays: a huge diversity of applications with quite different service requirements must be supported over a basic core of protocols. Also, the open and uncontrolled nature of Internet enforces the need to guarantee secure transactions among users, thus placing security as another hot topic. Finally, the explosion of mobility and its integration as part of the global infrastructure are probably now the most challenging issues in the networking field.

The increasing demand for sophisticated network applications, allied to the growth of the Internet traffic, has lead to great efforts in the search of improvements in data transmission technologies with the intention of satisfying the increasing demand for bandwidth. So far as optical networking is concerned, WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) appears as the main advance in the transmission area, because it allows transmission rates near to the theoretical limit of optical fibers, of the order of dozens of terabits a second [1]. An essential issue in optical network design is defining how the network will be controlled, that is, what type of signalling will be responsible for resource reservation, route determination and fault handling, among other functions that constitute the control plane. Label switching, which in IP networks is exemplified by MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) [2], was extended through GMPLS (Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching) [3] to operate with several different network technologies, where the label can be represented in other ways, for example, as time-slots in TDM networks, as physical switch ports and as wavelengths (lambdas) in WDM networks.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Fourth IFIP International Conference on Network Control and Engineering for QoS, Security and Mobility, NETCON 2005. The conference, organized by the International Federation for Information Processing, was held in Lannion, France from November 14-18, 2005. Coverage explores network security, network policy, quality of service, wireless networks, intelligent networks, and performance evaluation.

This text offers a complete and detailed overview of the ambient networking concept and technology. The authors explain the problems with current mobile IP networks and the need for a new mobile-aware IP-based control architecture, before presenting the ambient networking concept and the business opportunities offered by this solution.