Distributed multimedia systems are becoming more and more important in many situations of our daily life, for instance in office applications (video conferencing), learning environments (tele-teaching and tele-learning, virtual universities), or entertainment (online games, video-on-demand). Usually, some of the media types used in such an application have specific requirements on their transmission and presentation. The notion of Quality of Service (QoS) plays a central role when discussing about how to fulfil these requirements of multimedia applications. Distributed multimedia systems need QoS support in order to function properly. Moreover, other applications such as certain simulation systems need QoS functionality as well.

For this reason, research in QoS has increased significantly during the past few years. For an end-to-end QoS, which is in most applications necessary (user to user), support has to be provided in all components of the participating systems, i.e., the endsystem components, the communication system and the application. Accordingly, there has been active QoS research in network hardware (switches, routers), protocol software (RSVP, RTP etc.), operating systems (CPU scheduling), user interfaces, etc. Today, some of the basic technical issues are understood, but a significant amount of work is still necessary. Furthermore, additional research is devoted to (partially) non-technical issues such as pricing for QoS, but also new technical developments such as Active Networks.

The proposed seminar will concentrate on these new issues. Topics of interest for this seminar include:

• QoS Architectures/QoS Management
• Integrated and Differentiated Services
• Multicast and Routing Issues for QoS
• QoS in Mobile and Wireless Environments
• Pricing and Accounting for QoS
• QoS in Heterogeneous Networks
• Active/Programmable Networks and QoS
• QoS in Middleware
• User Level QoS
• Adaptive Applications

In 2000 a very successful Dagstuhl seminar on Quality of Service took place and many participants considered it to be very interesting to have a follow-up event. The proposers believe that it is now time to have another Dagstuhl seminar specifically dedicated to QoS. Submission figures of QoS-related conferences such as the International Workshop on QoS (between 100 and 200 papers in each of the last three years) indicate that there is an enormous interest in and potential for QoS research. The idea of this seminar is to bring together world-wide leading researchers with next-generation scientists in order to communicate a good picture of the state-of-the-art and to point out directions of future research. This goal is reflected by the selection of people to be invited. For each of the above topics, we tried to identify currently leading researchers as well as coming researchers. It should also be mentioned that the field is still small enough for most people being able to have a good overview of most of the proposed topics. This is certainly of major importance for intensive discussions.