From June 16 to 20, 1997, leading researchers from eight countries met at Schloß Dagstuhl to discuss High Performance Networks for Multimedia Applications. They came from telecommunications and computer networking backgrounds. It was the third workshop on this topic at the castle; the earlier two were held in 1993 and 1995.

Most of the contributions centered around three major issues: next generation Internet protocols, ATM networking (in particular traffic models and traffic shaping), and quality-of-service for multimedia applications. Already today much of the bandwidth of high-performance networks is used by multimedia applications, transmitting digital audio and video streams. 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 issues, and they proposed interesting and innovative solutions.

The report is a collection of abstracts of all the presentations given 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 ten highquality papers has appeared under the title "High-Performance Networks for Multimedia Applications", edited by the organizers of the workshop and published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in November 1998.

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 and 1995, the Dagstuhl team provided us with a very pleasant and hassle-free environment:this place is optimized for thinking

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