Welcome to IWQOS'97 in New York City! Over the past several years, there has been a considerable amount of research within the field of Quality of Service (QOS). Much of that work has taken place within the context of QOS support for distributed multimedia systems, operating systems, transport subsystems, networks, devices and formal languages. The objective of the Fifth International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQOS) is to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners working in all facets of QOS research. While many workshops and conferences offer technical sessions on the topic QOS, none other than IWQOS, provide a single-track workshop dedicated to QOS research. The theme of IWQOS'97 is building QOS into distributed systems. Implicit in that theme is the notion that the QOS community should now focus on discussing results from actual implementations of their work. As QOS research moves from theory to practice, we are interested in gauging the impact of ideas discussed at previous workshops on development of actual systems. While we are interested in experimental results, IWQOS remains a forum for fresh and innovative ideas emerging in the field. As a result of this, authors were solicited to provide experimental research (long) papers and more speculative position (short) statements for consideration. We think we have a great invited and technical program lined up for you this year. The program reflects the Program Committees desire to hear about experiment results, controversial QOS subjects and retrospectives on where we are and where we are going.

Multimedia Applications discusses the basic characteristics of multimedia document handling, programming, security, human computer interfaces, and multimedia application services. The overall goal of the book is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner: a multimedia application and its user interface must be developed in an integrated fashion with underlying multimedia middleware, operating systems, networks, security, and multimedia devices.

Fundamental information and properties of hypermedia document handling, multimedia security and various aspects of multimedia applications are presented, especially about document handling and their standards, programming of multimedia applications, design of multimedia information at human computer interfaces, multimedia security challenges such as encryption and watermarking, multimedia in education, as well as multimedia applications to assist preparation, processing and application of multimedia content.

Multimedia Systems discusses the basic characteristics of multimedia operating systems, networking and communication, and multimedia middleware systems. The overall goal of the book is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner: a multimedia application and its user interface must be developed in an integrated fashion with underlying multimedia middleware, operating systems, networks, security, and multimedia devices.

Fundamental characteristics of multimedia operating and distributed communication systems are presented, especially scheduling algorithms and other OS supporting approaches for multimedia applications with soft-real-time deadlines, multimedia file systems and servers with their decision algorithms for data placement, scheduling and buffer management, multimedia communication, transport, and streaming protocols, services with their error control, congestion control and other Quality of Service aware and adaptive algorithms, synchronization services with their skew control methods, and group communication with their group coordinating algorithms and other distributed services.

Multimedia Applications discusses the basic characteristics of multimedia document handling, programming, security, human computer interfaces, and multimedia application services. The overall goal of the book is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner: a multimedia application and its user interface must be developed in an integrated fashion with underlying multimedia middleware, operating systems, networks, security, and multimedia devices.

Fundamental information and properties of hypermedia document handling, multimedia security and various aspects of multimedia applications are presented, especially about document handling and their standards, programming of multimedia applications, design of multimedia information at human computer interfaces, multimedia security challenges such as encryption and watermarking, multimedia in education, as well as multimedia applications to assist preparation, processing and application of multimedia content.

Multimedia Systems discusses the basic characteristics of multimedia operating systems, networking and communication, and multimedia middleware systems. The overall goal of the book is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner: a multimedia application and its user interface must be developed in an integrated fashion with underlying multimedia middleware, operating systems, networks, security, and multimedia devices.

Fundamental characteristics of multimedia operating and distributed communication systems are presented, especially scheduling algorithms and other OS supporting approaches for multimedia applications with soft-real-time deadlines, multimedia file systems and servers with their decision algorithms for data placement, scheduling and buffer management, multimedia communication, transport, and streaming protocols, services with their error control, congestion control and other Quality of Service aware and adaptive algorithms, synchronization services with their skew control methods, and group communication with their group coordinating algorithms and other distributed services.

Welcome to IWQOS'97 in New York City! Over the past several years, there has been a considerable amount of research within the field of Quality of Service (QOS). Much of that work has taken place within the context of QOS support for distributed multimedia systems, operating systems, transport subsystems, networks, devices and formal languages. The objective of the Fifth International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQOS) is to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners working in all facets of QOS research. While many workshops and conferences offer technical sessions on the topic QOS, none other than IWQOS, provide a single-track workshop dedicated to QOS research. The theme of IWQOS'97 is building QOS into distributed systems. Implicit in that theme is the notion that the QOS community should now focus on discussing results from actual implementations of their work. As QOS research moves from theory to practice, we are interested in gauging the impact of ideas discussed at previous workshops on development of actual systems. While we are interested in experimental results, IWQOS remains a forum for fresh and innovative ideas emerging in the field. As a result of this, authors were solicited to provide experimental research (long) papers and more speculative position (short) statements for consideration. We think we have a great invited and technical program lined up for you this year. The program reflects the Program Committees desire to hear about experiment results, controversial QOS subjects and retrospectives on where we are and where we are going.