Proceedings of the 13th international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video

Welcome to the 2003 the International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV) in Monterey, California. This is now the 13th year that NOSSDAV has been bringing together researchers and developers to discuss the latest advances and explore future directions for multimedia systems. This year's NOSSDAV is an attempt to build on last year's success of having NOSSDAV and the International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS) back-to-back. IWQoS is a highly successful workshop and forum in its own right, and its focus on quality of service has evolved, to a large degree, from some of the original NOSSDAV themes. Given the historical and topical ties between NOSSDAV and IWQoS, the two steering committees felt there would be value in encouraging the re-mingling of the two audiences. This year, NOSSDAV and IWQoS are being held at the same time. We have largely synchronized the two workshops and have made it possible for participants to attend talks that are part of either workshop. We hope you will take advantage of this unique opportunity to interact with colleagues who offer new insights, possibly from a different perspective.As in past years, NOSSDAV continues to be a competitive workshop, attracting excellent papers with some of the top new ideas. The submission statistics this year are very much in line with last year's numbers. This year we received 60 papers, of which 18 were accepted for inclusion in the workshop. As in past years, several excellent papers had to be turned down.The span of topics this year ranges from data link layer issues associated with carrying multimedia traffic to application layer issues dealing with how to provide adequate service for games, voice, and streaming media. As in past years, this year's NOSSDAV includes papers describing new and improved methods for locating, accessing, and delivering both live and static streaming video. As more and more streaming media products hit the market, the problems of perceived quality, reliability, conferencing control, and other issues have become increasingly important to companies rolling out these technologies. One goal of the workshop is to identify the hot research areas but also to discuss, define, and develop directions for future research. This year's NOSSDAV addresses these issues with sessions and a panel that explore current and future directions in wireless, mobile multimedia systems and also multimedia systems based on overlays or adhoc peer-to-peer style networks. These emerging environments raise several interesting and challenging problems.The success of past NOSSDAVs can be attributed to high caliber committee members that have worked hard to make the conference the best it can be. This year was no exception. Each paper submitted was sent to at least three reviewers and occasionally four. After all the reviews were collected, papers with conflicting reviews were extensively discussed by the committee members in an attempt reach a consensus and fully examine the contributions of the work. The result is a workshop consisting of numerous outstanding papers. As program chairs, it was a delight to work with such a dedicated and conscientious program committee.Finally, this year sees the continued support of ACM and SIGMM. Once again they handled many of the administrative tasks to make the conference run as smoothly as possible.