Lo, soul! seest thou not God's purpose from the first? The earth to be spann'd, connected by net-work From Passage to India! Walt Whitman, "Leaves of Grass", 1900. The Internet is growing at a tremendous rate today. New services, such as telephony and multimedia, are being added to the pure data-delivery framework of yesterday. Such high demands on capacity could lead to a "bandwidth-crunch" at the core wide-area network resulting in degra dation of service quality. Fortunately, technological innovations have emerged which can provide relief to the end-user to overcome the In ternet's well-known delay and bandwidth limitations. At the physical layer, a major overhaul of existing networks has been envisaged from electronic media (such as twisted-pair and cable) to optical fibers - in the wide area, in the metropolitan area, and even in the local area set tings. In order to exploit the immense bandwidth potential of the optical fiber, interesting multiplexing techniques have been developed over the years. Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is such a promising tech nique in which multiple channels are operated along a single fiber si multaneously, each on a different wavelength. These channels can be independently modulated to accommodate dissimilar bit rates and data formats, if so desired. Thus, WDM carves up the huge bandwidth of an optical fiber into channels whose bandwidths (1-10 Gbps) are compati ble with peak electronic processing speed.

The ubiquitous nature of the Internet is enabling a new generation of - pUcations to support collaborative work among geographically distant users. Security in such an environment is of utmost importance to safeguard the pri vacy of the communication and to ensure the integrity of the applications. 'Secure group communications' (SGC) refers to a scenario in which a group of participants can receive and send messages to group members, in a way that outsiders are unable to glean any information even when they are able to intercept the messages. SGC is becoming extremely important for researchers and practitioners because many applications that require SGC are now widely used, such as teleconferencing, tele-medicine, real-time information services, distributed interactive simulations, collaborative work, grid computing, and the deployment of VPN (Virtual Private Networks). Even though considerable research accomplishments have been achieved in SGC, few books exist on this very important topic. The purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive survey of principles and state-of-the-art techniques for secure group communications over data net works. The book is targeted towards practitioners, researchers and students in the fields of networking, security, and software applications development. The book consists of 7 chapters, which are listed and described as follows."

Lo, soul! seest thou not God's purpose from the first? The earth to be spann'd, connected by net-work From Passage to India! Walt Whitman, "Leaves of Grass", 1900. The Internet is growing at a tremendous rate today. New services, such as telephony and multimedia, are being added to the pure data-delivery framework of yesterday. Such high demands on capacity could lead to a "bandwidth-crunch" at the core wide-area network resulting in degra dation of service quality. Fortunately, technological innovations have emerged which can provide relief to the end-user to overcome the In ternet's well-known delay and bandwidth limitations. At the physical layer, a major overhaul of existing networks has been envisaged from electronic media (such as twisted-pair and cable) to optical fibers - in the wide area, in the metropolitan area, and even in the local area set tings. In order to exploit the immense bandwidth potential of the optical fiber, interesting multiplexing techniques have been developed over the years. Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is such a promising tech nique in which multiple channels are operated along a single fiber si multaneously, each on a different wavelength. These channels can be independently modulated to accommodate dissimilar bit rates and data formats, if so desired. Thus, WDM carves up the huge bandwidth of an optical fiber into channels whose bandwidths (1-10 Gbps) are compati ble with peak electronic processing speed.

The ubiquitous nature of the Internet is enabling a new generation of - pUcations to support collaborative work among geographically distant users. Security in such an environment is of utmost importance to safeguard the pri vacy of the communication and to ensure the integrity of the applications. 'Secure group communications' (SGC) refers to a scenario in which a group of participants can receive and send messages to group members, in a way that outsiders are unable to glean any information even when they are able to intercept the messages. SGC is becoming extremely important for researchers and practitioners because many applications that require SGC are now widely used, such as teleconferencing, tele-medicine, real-time information services, distributed interactive simulations, collaborative work, grid computing, and the deployment of VPN (Virtual Private Networks). Even though considerable research accomplishments have been achieved in SGC, few books exist on this very important topic. The purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive survey of principles and state-of-the-art techniques for secure group communications over data net works. The book is targeted towards practitioners, researchers and students in the fields of networking, security, and software applications development. The book consists of 7 chapters, which are listed and described as follows."

With ever-increasing demands on capacity, quality of service, speed, and reliability, current Internet systems are under strain and under review. Combining contributions from experts in the field, this book captures the most recent and innovative designs, architectures, protocols, and mechanisms that will enable researchers to successfully build the next-generation Internet. A broad perspective is provided, with topics including innovations at the physical/transmission layer in wired and wireless media, as well as the support for new switching and routing paradigms at the device and sub-system layer. The proposed alternatives to TCP and UDP at the data transport layer for emerging environments are also covered, as are the novel models and theoretical foundations proposed for understanding network complexity. Finally, new approaches for pricing and network economics are discussed, making this ideal for students, researchers, and practitioners who need to know about designing, constructing, and operating the next-generation Internet.