With the continuing success of Local Area Networks (IANs), there is an increasing demand to extend their capabilities towards higher data rates and wider areas. This, together with the progress in fiber-optic technology, has given rise to the so-called Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs). MANs can span much greater distances than current LAN s, and offer data rates on the order of hundreds of Megabits/sec (Mbps). The success of MANs is mainly due to the opportunity they provide to develop new networking products capable of providing high-speed commu nications between applications at competitive prices, which nonetheless give an adequate return on the manufacturers' investments. A major factor in of appropriate networking standards. achieving this goal is the availability Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDl) and Distributed Queue Dual Bus (DQDB) are the two standard technologies for MANs for which industrial products are already available. For this reason, this book focuses mainly on these two standards. Nowadays there are several books dealing with MANs, and these look mainly at FDDI (e.g., [2], [92], [118], [141]). These books focus primarily on the architectures and protocols, whereas they pay little attention to per formance analysis. Due to the capability of MANs to integrate services, a quantitative analysis of the Quality of Service (QoS) provided by these tech nologies is a relevant issue, and is thus covered in depth in this book.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP-TC6 Eighth - ternational Conference on Personal Wireless Communications, PWC 2003. PWC 2003 is the ?agship conference of the IFIP Working Group 6.8, Mobile and Wireless Communications, and is the premier international forum for discussions between researchers, practitioners, and students interested in the symbiosis of mobile computing and wireless networks. It is a great pleasure to present the PWC 2003 technical program. This year the conference received 115 submissions from 27 countries indicating that PWC is a reference conference for worldwide researchers from the wireless and mobile community. With so many papers to choose from, the Technical Program Committee s job, to provide a conference program of the highest technical quality, was challenging and time consuming. From the 115 submissions, we ?nally selected 34 full papers and 15 short papers for presentation in the conference technical sessions. The conference technical program was split into three days, and included, in addition to the 49 refereed contributions, 4 invited papers from top-level researchers from the mobile and wireless community. To give researchers the opportunity to present ongoing work, and the novel ideas they are starting to explore, we included in the technical program two work-in-progress sessions and two novel-ideas sessions. The technical program also included a poster session devoted to presenting ongoing research projects on wireless and mobile communications."

This book presents the revised version of seven tutorials given at the NETWORKING 2002 Conference in Pisa, Italy in May 2002.The lecturers present a coherent view of the core issues in the following areas:- peer-to-peer computing and communications- mobile computing middleware- network security in the multicast framework- categorizing computing assets according to communication patterns- remarks on ad-hoc networking- communication through virtual technologies- optical networks.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-proceedings of two workshops on web engineering and peer-to-peer computing held in conjunction with NETWORKING 2002 in Pisa, Italy, in May 2002.The 31 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. They are organized in topical sections, models and characterization of web traffic, caching infrastructure and content delivery networks, building web-based systems, web server performance analysis, routing and discovery in peer-to-peer networks, applications, programming models for peer-to-peer systems, and security in peer-to-peer computing.