The aim of NGC is to allow researchers and practitioners to present the design and implementation techniques for networked group communication. The focus of the workshop is on peer-to-peer, multicast, and networked group communication, ranging from the link layer, through routing, and reliability and traffic control, right up to session and application level control mechanisms. This workshop is the fourth of this international event. The first workshop was in Pisa, Italy, in November 1999; the second was in Stanford, USA, in November 2000; the third was in London, UK, in November 2001.

We wish to distinguish NGC as a forum for novel and creative research projects and discussions on the future of networked group communication in academia and industry. To this end, NGC invites you to submit five-page extended abstracts. Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present at the workshop and publish full-length versions of their papers in the workshop proceedings. The extended abstract abstract should represent the paper in "short form." Authors should include full references, figures and significant results when available. The submissions will be judged on significance, originality, clarity, relevance, and correctness.

The conference will be held at Holiday Inn, Brookline in Boston, MA. It will start with two half-day tutorials on October 23, 2002. The technical program will include a keynote and invited talks on October 24-25, 2002. Depending on interest level, and suitable proposed topics, there may also be a panel discussion as well as a poster session. Authors are invited to submit papers on any issue related to networked group communication, including:

• peer-to-peer applications
• applications and services enabled through multicast
• wireless and mobile communication
• multiplayer games
• measurement studies
• content distribution
• network security
• application layer multicast
• economic models
• novel group communication architectures
• routing, naming, address allocation
• group and session management techniques
• QoS and network engineering
• scalability: overheads, stability, analysis, experiments
• adaption and congestion control for group communication
• heterogeneous group communication
• reliable and semi-reliable protocols

Important Dates:

Paper submission:	May 17, 2002
Notification:	July 24, 2002
Camera ready copy:	August 15, 2002
Conference Dates:	October 23-25, 2002

Committee:

Technical Co-Chairs:
Mostafa Ammar (Georgia Tech)
Brian Neil Levine (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

General Chair:
John Byers (Boston University)

Technical Committee:

Kevin Almeroth	UC Santa Barbara
Elizabeth Belding-Royer	University of California, Santa Barbara
Samrat Bhattacharjee	Univ. Maryland
Supratik Bhattacharyya	Sprint Advanced Technology Labs
Ernst Biersack	Institut Eurecom
John Byers	Boston University
Jon Crowcroft	University of Cambridge
Christophe Diot	Sprint Advanced Technology Labs
Constantinos Dovrolis	University of Delaware
Jordi Domingo-Pascual	Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya
Derek Eager	University of Saskatchewan
Wolfgang Effelsberg	University of Mannheim
Serge Fdida	Laboratoire LIP6-CNRS
Lixin Gao	University of Massachusetts
J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves	University of California, Santa Cruz
Mark Handley	ICSI Center for Internet Research
Markus Hoffman	Lucent Technologies
David Hutchison	Lancaster University
Sugih Jamin	University of Michigan
Jim Kurose	University of Massachusetts
Guy Leduc	universite de Liege
Jorg Liebeherr	University of Virginia
Laurent Mathy	Lancaster University
Sanjoy Paul	Lucent Technologies
Christos Papadopoulos	University of Southern California
Peter Parnes	Lulea University of Technology
Colin Perkins	Information Sciences Institute
Luigi Rizzo	ICSI Center for Internet Research
Dan Rubenstein	Columbia University
Clay Shields	Georgetown University
Burkhard Stiller	ETH Zuerich
Thierry Turletti	INRIA-Sophia Antipolis
Giorgio Ventre	Universita di Napoli Federico II