The number of users who rely on the Internet to deliver multimedia content has grown significantly in recent years. As this consumer demand grows, so, too, does our dependency on a wireless and streaming infrastructure which delivers videos, podcasts, and other multimedia. Streaming Media with Peer-to-Peer Networks: Wireless Perspectives offers insights into current and future communication technologies for a converged Internet that promises soon to be dominated by multimedia applications, at least in terms of bandwidth consumption. The book will be of interest to industry managers, and will also serve as a valuable resource to students and researchers looking to grasp the dynamic issues surrounding video streaming and wireless network development.

Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming describes novel solutions to enhance video quality, increase robustness to errors, and reduce end-to-end latency in video streaming systems. This book will be of use to both academics and professionals as it presents thorough coverage and solutions for current issues with Video Streaming and Peer-to-Peer architectures. The book provides an overview of today’s state-of-the art video streaming technology. It presents adaptive video coding and streaming techniques for performance enhancement of conventional client-server systems and P2P multicast. The detailed appendix incorporates various additional experiments.

Peer-to-peer networking is a disruptive technology for large scale distributed app- cations that has recently gained wide interest due to the successes of peer-to-peer (P2P) content sharing, media streaming, and telephony applications. There are a large range of other applications under development or being proposed. The - derlying architectures share features such as decentralizaton, sharing of end system resources, autonomy, virtualization, and self-organization. These features constitute the P2P paradigm. This handbook broadly addresses a large cross-section of c- rent research and state-of-the-art reports on the nature of this paradigm from a large number of experts in the ?eld. Several trends in information and network technology such as increased perf- mance and deployment of broadband networking, wireless networking, and mobile devices are synergistic with and reinforcing the capabilities of the P2P paradigm. There is general expectation in the technical community that P2P networking will continue to be an important tool for networked applications and impact the evo- tion of the Internet. A large amount of research activity has resulted in a relatively short time, and a growing community of researchers has developed. The Handbook of Peer-to-Peer Networking is dedicated to discussions on P2P networks and their applications. This is a comprehensive book on P2P computing.

"This book spans a number of interdependent and emerging topics in streaming media, offering a comprehensive collection of topics including media coding, wireless/mobile video, P2P media streaming, and applications of streaming media"--Provided by publisher.

We are delighted to present the proceedings of the 8th IFIP/IEEE International Conference on Management of Multimedia Networks and Services (MMNS 2005). The MMNS 2005 conference was held in Barcelona, Spain on October 24–26, 2005. As in previous years, the conference brought together an international audience of researchers and scientists from industry and academia who are researching and developing state-of-the-art management systems, while creating a public venue for results dissemination and intellectual collaboration. This year marked a challenging chapter in the advancement of management systems for the wider management research community, with the growing complexities of the “so-called” multimedia over Internet, the proliferation of alternative wireless networks (WLL, WiFi and WiMAX) and 3G mobile services, intelligent and high-speed networks scalable multimedia services and the convergence of computing and communications for data, voice and video delivery. Contributions from the research community met this challenge with 65 paper submissions; 33 high-quality papers were subsequently selected to form the MMNS 2005 technical program. The diverse topics in this year’s program included wireless networking technologies, wireless network applications, quality of services, multimedia, Web applications, overlay network management, and bandwidth management.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the two thematic workshops held jointly with Networking 2002: WEB Engineering and Peer-to-Peer C- puting. Networking 2002 was organized by the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and was sponsored by the IFIP working groups WG 6.2 (Network and Intern- work Architectures), WG 6.3 (Performance of Communication Systems), and WG 6.8 (Wireless Communications). The program of the conference covered ?ve days and included the main conference (three days), two tutorial days, and one day of thematic workshops. TheInternationalWorkshoponWebEngineeringwasdedicatedtothedisc- sionoftheprincipalissuesthatemergeinthedesignandimplementationoflar- scale, complex, Web-based systems. Scalability issues pose a number of ch- lenging problems to solve for both applications and the underlying web/network infrastructure. On one hand, web services and internet applications must take into account network performance and transport protocol design, to achieve - ceptable performance and robustness. On the other hand, emerging network and Web technologies are determined by the requirements of these applications. Fifteen papers were presented that illustrated the current state of the art in this area. In addition to the authors of these papers, the Workshop on Web Engine- ing was attended by about thirty participants, who contributed to the workshop by stimulating fruitful discussions at the end of each presentation. Thus, this workshop provided a excellent opportunity for researchers, from both industry and academia, to gather, exchange ideas, and discuss recent results in the dev- opment of Web-based systems and emerging Internet applications.