This workshop presents an award-winning, NSF-funded, project-based curriculum for algorithm design that includes algorithmic strategies for intractable problems. This curriculum is a sequence of laboratory projects comprising increasingly sophisticated solvers for a single intractable problem, designed to integrate into existing, one-term, undergraduate courses that teach algorithm design and/or intractability without sacrificing traditional course content. The presenters have used the curriculum in the Design and Analysis of Algorithms course at their institution to help students tackle and appreciate intractability. This workshop presents versions of the curriculum centered on TSP, SAT and Sudoku. Attendees will receive adoption materials and access to an adopters' forum. NSF is funding the development, evaluation, dissemination and adoption of the curriculum. Potential adopters are encouraged to apply for funding to attend this workshop and SIGCSE 2014 at http://www.rowan.edu/~lobo/AlgosCurriculum. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1140753. Laptop optional.

The national importance of creating "content reflecting cutting edge developments in STEM fields" has been recognized the National Science Foundation. The National Research Council has also noted that creating engaging laboratory and classroom experiences is a challenge to effective undergraduate education in STEM disciplines. In this paper we present our endeavors to address these issues in the field of computer networks. We discuss our experiences with novel laboratory and classroom projects using OPNET and Wireshark software products in undergraduate networking courses. These laboratories help undergraduate students understand fundamental networking concepts through modeling and simulation of computing systems. We have found that their use enhances student learning and interest in the subject of computer networks.

The users of third generation personal communications services (PCS) will be applications with diverse quality of service requirements. This work addresses the fixed network delay of call setup in a personal communications network (PCN) architecture with wireless access to an ATM backbone network. We derive expressions for the PCS-to-PCS, PCS-to-wireline and wireline-to-PCS call setup delays. These expressions are functions of utilization and of the delays to authenticate a PCS user, process a signaling message, and set up an ATM connection, among others. Numerical results are presented for wide ranges of parameter values. The impact of various parameters on these results is studied. It is found that the delay to authenticate a PCS user is a major component of call setup delay for the studied parameters. Reducing the authentication delay from 500 to 100 ms decreases the call setup delay between 10 and 50%.

In a wide-area network with high-speed links, congestion may lead to poor utilization and the degradation of the service provided to the users. This paper presents a cooperative congestion management scheme in which the intermediate nodes in the vicinity of a congested link share their resources to offload this link before packets are discarded. The scheme uses a progression of proactive control mechanisms on selected traffic bursts: from local rerouting, through upstream rerouting and quenching, to packet discarding. It complements existing open-loop mechanisms by allowing a more liberal packet admission while preserving the underlying switching architecture. The performance evaluation results obtained via simulation show that its implementation reduces the probability of packet discarding by an order of magnitude.