From June 19 to 23, 1995, leading international researchers on computer networks met at Schloß Dagstuhl to discuss Architecture and Protocols for High Performance Networks. It was the second workshop on this topic at the castle; the first one having taken place in September 1993.

The purpose of the workshop was to bring together telecommunication engineers, computer communication experts and multimedia application designers, three groups of people who not very often talk to each other. All of the participants were experts in their fields, from many different countries, and the presentations and discussions were at a very high level.

Although a wide range of problems was covered at the workshop, most of the contributions centered around two major issues: ATM networking, and quality—of—servicefor multimedia applications. It is expected that most of the bandwidth in future high-performance networks will be used up by multimedia applications, transmitting digital audio and video. Traditional networking protocols are not appropriate for these new applications; for example, they do not provide guarantees on bandwidth, end-to-end delay or delay jitter, and they do not have addressing schemes or routing algorithms for multicast connections. Also, the formal traffic models published in the communications literature do not capture the properties of multimedia streams very well. The presentations and discussions at the workshop addressed these and many similar issues, and proposed interesting and innovative solutions.

This report is a collection of abstracts of all the presentations at the workshop. Its purpose is to provide a quick overview of the topics. In order to keep the sessions informal, the participants were not required to submit a paper in advance. However, the organizers volunteered to edit a volume of proceedings if potential authors were interested. And indeed, a selection of high—qualitypapers will appear under the title "High-Speed Networking and Multimedia Applications", edited by the organizers of the workshop and to be published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in December 1995.

The organizers wish to thank all the participants for coming to Dagstuhl, and for the many lively and inspiring discussions. In the long evenings, many of us made new friends, and decided to work together more closely in the future. And again, as in 1993, the Dagstuhl team provided us with an excellent environment: this place is optimized for thinking.

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