th We are very happy to present the proceedings of the 8 International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems IDMS 2001, in co-operation with ACM SIGCOMM and SIGMM. These proceedings contain the technical programme for IDMS 2001, held September 4 7, 2001 in Lancaster, UK. For the technical programme this year we received 48 research papers from both a- demic and industrial institutions all around the world. After the review process, 15 were accepted as full papers for publication, and a further 8 as short positional papers, intended to provoke debate. The technical programme was complimented by three invited papers: QoS for Multimedia What's Going to Make It Pay? by Derek McAuley, E nabling the Internet to Provide Multimedia Services by Markus H- mann, and MPEG-21 Standard: Why an Open Multimedia Framework? by Fernando Pereira. The organisers are very grateful for the help they received to make IDMS 2001 a successful event. In particular, we would like to thank the PC for their first class - views of papers, particularly considering the tight reviewing deadlines this year. Also, we would like to acknowledge the support from Agilent, BTexact Technologies, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft Research, Orange, and Sony Electronics without whom IDMS 2001 would not have been such a memorable event. We hope that readers will find these proceedings helpful in their future research, and that IDMS will continue to be an active forum for the discussion of distributed mul- media research for years to come.

Invited Presentation.- QoS for Multimedia - What's Going to Make It Pay?.- Short Papers.- New Resource Control Issues in Shared Clusters.- Transport-Level Protocol Coordination in Cluster-to-Cluster Applications.- Data to the People - It's a Matter of Control.- An Access Control Architecture for Metropolitan Area Wireless Networks.- Media Distribution.- Design and Implementation of a QoS-Aware Replication Mechanism for a Distributed Multimedia System.- Distribution of Video-on-Demand in Residential Networks.- A QoS Negotiation Scheme for Efficient Failure Recovery in Multi-resolution Video Servers.- QoS Issues in Multimedia.- Tolerance of Highly Degraded Network Conditions for an H.323-Based VoIP Service.- Conception, Implementation, and Evaluation of a QoS-Based Architecture for an IP Environment Supporting Differentiated Services.- A Service Differentiation Scheme for the End-System.- Invited Presentation.- Enabling the Internet to Provide Multimedia Services.- Multimedia Middleware.- Design and Application of TOAST: An Adaptive Distributed Multimedia Middleware Platform.- QoS Management Middleware: A Separable, Reusable Solution.- State Transmission Mechanisms for a Collaborative Virtual Environment Middleware Platform.- Congestion Control and Adaptation.- A Stable and Flexible TCP-Friendly Congestion Control Protocol for Layered Multicast Transmission.- Content-Aware Quality Adaptation for IP Sessions with Multiple Streams.- The Minimal Buffering Requirements of Congestion Controlled Interactive Multimedia Applications.- Short Papers.- Video Content Management Using Logical Content.- Adaptive Clustering Using Mobile Agents in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks.- Mobile 4-in-6: A Novel Mechanism for IPv4/v6 Transitioning.- The Case for Streaming Multimedia with TCP.-Invited Presentation.- The MPEG-21 Standard: Why an Open Multimedia Framework?.- Control of Multimedia Networks.- Selecting the QoS Parameters for Multicast Applications Based on User Profile and Device Capability.- A Novel Group Integrity Concept for Multimedia Multicasting.- Constraint-Based Configuration of Proxylets for Programmable Networks.