Communication systems are now ubiquitous and making them more intelligent remains very challenging. The IFIP International Conference on Intelligence in Communication Systems is an effort to bring together researchers and practitioners who represent the latest developments in this area. This volume contains selected papers from the conference in the following focus areas: ad hoc networks / hybrid networks / WLAN; security, privacy and consumer protection; adaptive architectures and protocols; flexible QoS and QoS management; flexible service specification, validation, searching and querying; service composition and Web services; personal, terminal and node mobility; programmable and active networks.

Communication systems are now ubiquitous and making them more intelligent remains very challenging. The IFIP International Conference on Intelligence in Communication Systems is an effort to bring together researchers and practitioners who represent the latest developments in this area. This volume contains selected papers from the conference in the following focus areas: ad hoc networks / hybrid networks / WLAN; security, privacy and consumer protection; adaptive architectures and protocols; flexible QoS and QoS management; flexible service specification, validation, searching and querying; service composition and Web services; personal, terminal and node mobility; programmable and active networks.

The beginning of the twenty-first century is characterized by global markets, and the mobility of people is becoming an important fact of life. Consequently, the mobile user is demanding appropriate technical solutions to make use of customized information and communication services. In this context the notion of next-generation networks (NGNs), which are driven by the convergence of the entertainment sector, the mobile Internet, and fixed/mobile telecommunications, is emerging. Such NGNs are aggregating a variety of different access networks and supporting the seamless connection of an open set of end-user devices, and due to the adoption of an all-IP network paradigm they enable a much better integration of voice and data services. Coincidently the buzzword 'fixed mobile convergence' (FMC) describes the current trend towards providing common services across fixed and mobile networks resulting in the medium term in the full integration of fixed and mobile telecommunication networks. The adoption of appropriate middleware technologies and the provision of - called service delivery platforms driven by the ongoing innovation in the field of information technologies provides today the technical foundation for supporting terminal, personal and service mobility and thus the implementation of real seamless information and communication services. Furthermore, users are nowadays looking, in light of an omnipresent service environment, for a much higher degree of customization and context awareness in the services they use. The papers in this volume look at these enabling mobility-aware technologies and their use for implementing mobility-aware and context-aware applications.

It is becoming quite clear that there will be important technological advances in - bile and wireless connectivity, known as third-/fourth-generation (3G and 4G) mobile telecommunications systems. As a result we will be surrounded by ever-growing m- tidomain (technical and administrative) heterogeneous communications in both wired and wireless networks. This resulting environment deals with communication in m- tizoned networks, where people, devices, appliances and servers are connected to each other via different kinds of networks. Networks will be pervasive, ubiquitous, multis- vice, multioperatorand multiaccess. The mobility trend will also be spurred forward by the growing availability of mobile-enabled handheld devices. Mobile systems are expected to provide mobile users with cost-effective, secure, yet ubiquitous service access anywhere and anytime. Users will then continue to enjoy the new-found freedom mobile access provides and will have increasingly high exp- tations of mobility-aware applications that should be capable of seamlessly supporting the mobile lifestyle. The papers in this volume discuss issues from models, platforms, and architectures for mobility-aware systems to security, mobile agent technologies, sensitive com- nications, context awareness, mobile applications and management. They cover both practical experience and novel research ideas and concepts.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Mobile Agents for Telecommunication Applications, MATA 2002, held in Barcelona, Spain, in October 2002. The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The papers are organized in topical sections on agent architecture, framework, and platforms; mobile agent frameworks for telecommunication services; mobile agents in active networks; context-aware and ad-hoc communications; distributed monitoring and network management; security of mobile agents; mobile computing and QoS; migration and network management; mobile services; and collaborative environments and services.

Multimedia systems result from the merging of the computing, communications and broadcasting industries. This merging has been made possible today by the technical advances in high speed broadband networks, computer desktop workstations, and information storage and compression techniques.

Currently, text and image are the predominant forms of information exchanged over the Internet. However, there are clear signs that the situation is rapidly changing with the recent emergence of multimedia applications in the area of education, business, e-commerce and entertainment -- resulting, therefore, in increased consumption of network bandwidth and in the creation of a very large volume of information that needs to be processed and stored. This trend has made strong demands on the multimedia modeling research community to develop new semantic models that will further facilitate the creation, representation, manipulation and animation of multimedia content with a better level of granularity than what is possible to achieve with today's multimedia information systems.

This volume explores issues associated with multimedia modeling information and systems and presents the current status of work in this field. It covers a broad range of theoretical, conceptual and practical topics and addresses the needs of a wide audience including researchers, multimedia systems designers and users of multimedia systems.