We arehappy to welcome you to the IFIP Protocols for High-Speed Networks '96 workshop hosted by INRIA Sophia Antipolis. This is the fifth event in a series initiated in Zurich in 1989 followed by Palo Alto (1990), Stockholm (1993), and Vancouver (1994). This workshop provides an international forum for the exchange of information on protocols for high-speed networks. The workshop focus on problems related to the e: fficient transmission of multimedia application data using high-speed networks and internetworks. Protocol for High-Speed Networks is a "working conference." That explains we have privileged high quality papers describing on-going research and novel ideas. The number of selected papers was kept low in order to leave room for discussion on each paper. Together with the technical sessions, working sessions were organized on hot topics. We would like to thank all the authors for their interest. We also thank the Program Committee members for the Ievel of effort in the reviewing process and in the workshop technical program organization. We finally thank INRIA and DRET for their financial support to the organization of the workshop.

We arehappy to welcome you to the IFIP Protocols for High-Speed Networks '96 workshop hosted by INRIA Sophia Antipolis. This is the fifth event in a series initiated in Zurich in 1989 followed by Palo Alto (1990), Stockholm (1993), and Vancouver (1994). This workshop provides an international forum for the exchange of information on protocols for high-speed networks. The workshop focus on problems related to the e:fficient transmission of multimedia application data using high-speed networks and internetworks. Protocol for High-Speed Networks is a "working conference". That explains we have privileged high quality papers describing on-going research and novel ideas. The number of selected papers was kept low in order to leave room for discussion on each paper. Together with the technical sessions, working sessions were organized on hot topics. We would like to thank all the authors for their interest. We also thank the Program Committee members for the Ievel of effort in the reviewing process and in the workshop technical program organization. We finally thank INRIA and DRET for their financial support to the organization of the workshop.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International COST 237 Workshop, held in Lisboa, Portugal, in December 1997 of the European COST Programme on Multimedia Telecommunication Services. The 12 revised full papers presented were selected from 24 submissions. The topics covered include multimedia presentation, QoS Control, electronic commerce, CORBA and DCE, real-time multimedia, multimedia conferenceing, multicast networking, heterogeneous communications environments, and others.