Multimedia services over IP networks are proliferating at an enormous speed. There is also increasing demand for solutions which provide assured levels of service quality. All of these require novel paradigms, models and architectures for realising integrated end-to-end service management rather than managing network elements in isolation. Providing scalable Quality of Service (QoS) while maintaining fairness, along with secure and optimal network resource management are key challenges for the future Internet. These challenges apply to both fixed and wireless networks.

The IFIP/IEEE International Conference on Management of Multimedia Networks and Services will hold its sixth annual meeting from September 7th to September 10th, 2003 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. MMNS provides an intimate setting for discussion and debate. In just 6 years, MMNS has established itself as one of the premier conferences with a focus on the management of multimedia networks and services. The conference objective is to bring together researchers working in all facets of network and service management as applied to broadband networks and multimedia services. MMNS deals with all aspects of designing, developing and deploying networked multimedia systems and it serves as a forum for the dissemination of state-of-the-art research and development results.

MMNS 2003 will also include panel sessions in which experts offer their observations and opinions about current hot topics. The keynote speaker will be Professor Ian Akyildiz, Georgia Institute of Technology who will present a vision of future interplanetary network architectures. Professor Derek McAuley, head of Intel's recently formed laboratory at Cambridge, UK, will describe some of the new research being undertaken on global overlay networks and applications.

The program committee is soliciting original papers describing research in the area of management of multimedia networks and services. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Active multimedia network management
• Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks
• Augmented and Virtual Reality Networks
• Billing and Accounting
• Cable multimedia network management
• Content distribution internetworking
• Deployment of multimedia services
• Distributed multimedia service management
• End-to-end IP multimedia network and service management
• IP Video, streaming, interactive video service management
• Middleware support for management
• Multimedia network traffic engineering and optimization
• Multimedia traffic management
• Multimedia content protection
• Multimedia session management
• Multi-point, multicast services management
• Network management models and architectures
• Network programmability for multimedia services
• Optical multimedia network management
• Policy-based management for multi-media services
• Provisioning of multimedia networks and services
• QoS in WLANs
• QoS management
• Resource, performance and fault management
• Security and Authentication
• VoIP service management
• Web Services
• Wireless and mobile multimedia network management