Proceedings of the 12th international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video

Welcome to the 2002 International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV'02) in Miami Beach, Florida. This is now the 12th 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 unique as it marks the first time it is being held in conjunction with the International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS). 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.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 58 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 Voice over IP 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. This year's NOSSDAV has an entire session on these very topics. 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 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.