This conference in Enschede, The Netherlands, is the sixth in a series of international conferences and workshops under the title Protocols for Multimedia Systems, abbreviated as PROMS. The first PROMS workshop took place in June 1994 in Berlin, Germany, followed by workshops in Salzburg, Austria (October 1995) and Madrid, Spain (October 1996). In 1997, PROMS formed a temporary alliance with Multimedia Networking, a conference previously held in Aizu, Japan, in 1995. This led to the international conference on Protocols for Multimedia Systems - Multimedia Networking, PROMS MmNet, that took place in Santiago, Chile (November 1997). Since then PROMS has been announced as an international conference, although informal contacts and interactive sessions - as in a workshop - were retained as a desirable feature of PROMS. After a gap of three years, PROMS was organized in Cracow, Poland (October 2000), for the fifth time. We consider it a challenge to make this sixth edition of PROMS as successful as the previous events. The goal of the PROMS series of conferences and workshops is to contribute to scientific, strategic, and practical cooperation between research institutes and industrial companies in the area of multimedia protocols. This is also the goal of PROMS 2001. The basic theme of this conference continues to be multimedia protocols, both at the network and application level, although the increasing interest in wireless, mobility, and quality of service as interrelated topics with relevance to multimedia are reflected in the current program.

The first International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems and Telecommunication Services (IDMS) was organized by Prof. K. Rothermel and Prof. W. Effelsberg, and took place in Stuttgart in 1992. It had the form of a national forum for discussion on multimedia issues related to communications. The succeeding event was "attached" as a workshop to the German Computer Science Conference (GI Jahrestagung) in 1994 in Hamburg, organized by Prof. W. Lamersdorf. The chairs of the third IDMS, E. Moeller and B. Butscher, enhanced the event to become a very successful international meeting in Berlin in March 1996. This short overview on the first three IDMS events is taken from the preface of the IDMS'97 proceedings (published by Springer as Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 1309), written by Ralf Steinmetz and Lars Wolf. Both, Ralf Steinmetz as general chair and Lars Wolf as program chair of IDMS'97, organized an excellent international IDMS in Darmstadt. Since 1998, IDMS has moved from Germany to other European cities to emphasize the international character it had gained in the previous years. IDMS'98 was organized in Oslo by Vera Goebel and Thomas Plagemann at UniK - Center for Technology at Kjeller, University of Oslo. Michel Diaz, Phillipe Owezarski, and Patrick Senac successfully organized the sixth IDMS event, again outside Germany. IDMS'99 took place in Toulouse at ENSICA. IDMS 2000 continued the tradition and was hosted in Enschede, the Netherlands."