The first International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems and Telecommunication Services (IDMS) was organized by Prof. K. Rothermel and Prof. W. Effelsberg, and took place in Stuttgart in 1992. It had the form of a national forum for discussion on multimedia issues related to communications. The succeeding event was "attached" as a workshop to the German Computer Science Conference (GI Jahrestagung) in 1994 in Hamburg, organized by Prof. W. Lamersdorf. The chairs of the third IDMS, E. Moeller and B. Butscher, enhanced the event to become a very successful international meeting in Berlin in March 1996. This short overview on the first three IDMS events is taken from the preface of the IDMS’97 proceedings (published by Springer as Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 1309), written by Ralf Steinmetz and Lars Wolf. Both, Ralf Steinmetz as general chair and Lars Wolf as program chair of IDMS’97, organized an excellent international IDMS in Darmstadt. Since 1998, IDMS has moved from Germany to other European cities to emphasize the international character it had gained in the previous years. IDMS’98 was organized in Oslo by Vera Goebel and Thomas Plagemann at UniK – Center for Technology at Kjeller, University of Oslo. Michel Diaz, Phillipe Owezarski, and Patrick Sénac successfully organized the sixth IDMS event, again outside Germany. IDMS'99 took place in Toulouse at ENSICA. IDMS 2000 continued the tradition and was hosted in Enschede, the Netherlands.

Content Description #Includes bibliographical references and index.

The 1999 International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Sys tems and Telecommunication Services (IDMS) in Toulouse is the sixth in a se ries that started in 1992. The previous workshops were held in Stuttgart in 1992, Hamburg in 1994, Berlin in 1996, Darmstadt in 1997, and Oslo in 1998. The area of interest of IDMS ranges from basic system technologies, such as networking and operating system support, to all kinds of teleservices and distributed multimedia applications. Technical solutions for telecommunications and distributed multimedia systems are merging and quality-of-service (QoS) will play a key role in both areas. However, the range from basic system tech nologies to distributed mutlimedia applications and teleservices is still very broad and we have to understand the implications of multimedia applications and their requirements for middleware and networks. We are challenged to develop new and more fitting solutions for all distributed multimedia systems and telecom munication services to meet the requirements of the future information society.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems and Telecommunication Services, IDMS'98, held in Oslo, Norway, in September 1998. The 23 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from a total of 68 submissions. Also included are seven position statements. The book is divided into topical sections on distributed multimedia applications; platforms for collaborative systems; MPEG; coding for WWW, wireless, and mobile environments; QoS and user aspects; flow control, congestion control, and multimedia streams; multimedia servers, documents, and authoring; and storage servers.

th We are very happy to present the proceedings of the 8 International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems IDMS 2001, in co-operation with ACM SIGCOMM and SIGMM. These proceedings contain the technical programme for IDMS 2001, held September 4 7, 2001 in Lancaster, UK. For the technical programme this year we received 48 research papers from both a- demic and industrial institutions all around the world. After the review process, 15 were accepted as full papers for publication, and a further 8 as short positional papers, intended to provoke debate. The technical programme was complimented by three invited papers: QoS for Multimedia What’s Going to Make It Pay? by Derek McAuley, E nabling the Internet to Provide Multimedia Services by Markus H- mann, and MPEG-21 Standard: Why an Open Multimedia Framework? by Fernando Pereira. The organisers are very grateful for the help they received to make IDMS 2001 a successful event. In particular, we would like to thank the PC for their first class - views of papers, particularly considering the tight reviewing deadlines this year. Also, we would like to acknowledge the support from Agilent, BTexact Technologies, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft Research, Orange, and Sony Electronics without whom IDMS 2001 would not have been such a memorable event. We hope that readers will find these proceedings helpful in their future research, and that IDMS will continue to be an active forum for the discussion of distributed mul- media research for years to come.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Joint International Workshops on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems and Protocols for Multimedia Systems, IDMS/PROMS 2002, held in Coimbra, Portugal in November 2002.The 30 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 112 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on performance of protocols and applications, mobile multimedia systems, standards and related issues, quality of service, video systems and applications, resource management, and multimedia support.

Networked computer games, distributed virtual reality systems and shared whiteboard presentations are prominent examples of distributed interactive media - they allow a group of users to interact with the medium itself. This book investigates the distributed interactive media class in detail. Topics include: abstract media model, how to ensure consistency, an application-level protocol and how to develop reusable functionality such as support for late-comers and session-recording. The main intention of this book is to demonstrate that distinct distributed interactive media have many problems in common and to show how to solve these problems in a generic and reusable fashion for the whole media.