Selected papers from the 3rd international workshop on QoS in multiservice IP networks (QoS-IP 2005)

During the years 2000 and 2001, the Italian Ministry for University and Scientific Research funded four research projects covering various topics in the field of networking: IPPO (IP packet optical networks), NEBULA IP (Techniques for end-to-end quality of service control in multidomain IP networks), PLANET-IP (Planning IP networks), and RAMON (Reconfigurable access module for mobile computing applications). As a final joint event, the four projects converged in the preparation of the Second International Workshop on QoS in Multiservice IP Networks (QoS-IP 2003), which was held in Milan in February 2003. QoS-IP 2003 comprised 13 technical sessions, including two invited talks and the presentation of 53 high-quality papers selected from about one hundred submissions to the workshop. This special issue of Computer Networks includes extended versions of selected papers from QoS-IP 2003. The papers provide an overview of the topics discussed during the workshop and are representative of some of the most relevant research issues in the field of networking. The first two papers deal with solutions to improve the quality of service (QoS) in the Internet of today: one focuses on the provisioning of video streaming, the other on improvements achievable by acting on the end user behavior. A protocol for video streaming service is proposed in ‘‘Adaptive video streaming: pre-encoded MPEG-4 with bandwidth scaling,’’ by A. Balk, M. Gerla, D. Maggiorini, and M.Y. Sanadidi. By dynamically adapting the transmission rate to the network conditions, the protocol aims at achieving