Management of Multimedia on the Internet

The 5th IFIP/IEEE International Conference on Management of Multimedia NetworksandServices(MMNS) washeld inSanta Barbara,California. Thiswas the ?fthyearthatMMNSbroughttogetherresearchersanddeveloperstodiscuss the latestadvancesandexplorefuture directionsfor managingmultimedia inthe Internet. As in pastyears,MMNS continues to be a competitive conference,attracting excellentpaperswithsomeofthetopnewideas. Thisyearwereceived76papers, of which 27 were accepted for inclusion in the program. What was particularly impressive this year was the large percentage of very high quality papers. The submissions made the job of the program committee extremely di?cult. The span of topics this year ranged from network-layer tra?c di?erentiation to application-layer consideration for multimedia tra?c. At the network layer, a number of papers attempt to develop better solutions for di?erentiated s- vices in the Internet. The issue of bandwidth sharing, particularly in wireless networks, is the focus of another set of papers. Next, by increasing the level of abstraction slightly, researchers are focusing on managing "services".In part- ular, these services include one-to-many communication and video distribution architectures. Finally, from the user perspective there are two problems. What can applications do to help achieve better quality from the Internet? And, how cantechnologybeappliedto enterprisemanagementsystems?Takingthepapers in the MMNS program together, they o?er a range of solutions to key problems in managing multimedia tra?c in the Internet. The success of MMNS can largely be attributed to high caliber committee members who worked hard to make the conference the best it could be. Each paper submitted was typically sent to four reviewers.