Topics in internet technology

The series is published in May and October every year The quality of the series depends on the quality of papers and the stringent refereeing carried out hy a large number of volunteers. Wewould like to thank the authors and reviewers for their time and dedication to this series. We would also invite potential authors to continue submitting high-quality papers. There are three articles that have been selected for publication in this issue of the series. We would like to acknowledge the efforts of the past series editors for selecting two of ’ quality of the series. nism for this’issue. The new proposal provides different video resolutions to receiver nodes with different requirements for reserved resources. Therefore, it does not waste precious resources on the Internet transmitting unnecessary multimedia packets. The third article in this series, “Tandem-Free VoIP Conferencing: A Bridge to Next-Generation Networks” by Paxton ‘Smith et al., discusses tandem-free voice-over-IP (VoIP) conferencing in order to provide a bridge to the next-generation networks. After surveying different approaches to teleconferencing VoIP networks, Smith et al. discuss a hybrid solution that incorporates tandem-free bridging and endpoint mixing (full mesh and multicast), The authors look at important parameters such as perceived quality, system scalability, conference control, and system compatibility. They show that centralized conference bridges used with compressed speech the artiile) during their tcrni 2s wrieb editors dr.gr.de cpecch quality u k n multiplc talker, arc m i k J xnd suh~ected to tanJeni codinc onerarions. In addition, 1h.y s h w Thc Internei cun?ists d il larer numhcr cif independent network domains called autonomnus systems. Various t ra f f ic engineering techniques are used to control and manage the flow of traffic between these domains. The first article, “lnterdomain Traffic Engineering with B G P by Quoitin, Pelsser, Swinnen, Bonaventure, and Uhlig, discusses the use of Border Gateway Protocol, the de facto routing protocol for traffic flowing between domains, to manage that flow. The characteristics of interdomain traffic determine the traffic engineering solutions that can he applied to manage interdomain traffic. The authors have analyzed the characteristic of interdomain traffic, from measurements in real networks, to conclude that a large fraction of the traffic routed through a domain originates from only a small number of the other domains. They have discussed techniques to control the flow of outgoing traffic, and carefully tune the route advertisements hy a domain tn control the incoming traffic to the domain. The second article, “Dynamic RSVP Protocol” by G. S. Kuo and P. C. KO, proposes an extension to the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP), Dynamic RSVP (DRSVP), to dynamically adjust the reserved resources on nodes to request quality of service (QoS) for multicast multimedia. They first discuss the protocol and its characteristics. Then they show how the protocol can he used by a host to request specific QoS for multicast multimedia flows on the Internet. The authors believe that this extension is needed because the resolutions of display systems used in different receiver nodes might he different; the multiresolution characteristic is supported in the MPEG-4 standard, and the EZW compression algorithm can cease decoding at any point in the hitstream. However, regular RSVP does not provide a flexible mechathat when the c o n f e r e n c e i b l a r g e , ful l mesh and m u h a s t solutions are inadequate. We would like to acknowledge the help of the current and past Editors-in-Chief, Roch H. Glitho and G. S. Kuo, respectively, for guidance, and the IEEE editorial staff, Joe Milizzo, Sue Lange, Jennifer Porcello, and Cathy Kemelmacher, for helping with the production of this series. We welcome any comments you may have to further improve the quality of this series.