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This work is partially supported by the European Community under the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme of the 6th Framework Programme for RTD-project ELeGI, contract IST-002205. This document does not represent the opinion of the European Community, and the European Community is not responsible for any use that might be made of data appearing therein.

There is a growing interest in the use of variants of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in high-speed networks. ns-2 has implementations of many of these high-speed TCP variants, as does Linux. ns-2, through an extension, permits the incorporation of Linux TCP code within ns-2 simulations. As these TCP variants become more widely used, users are concerned about how these different variants of TCP might interact in a real network environment -how fair are these protocol variants to each other (in their use of the available capacity) when sharing the same network. Typically, the answer to this question might be sought through simulation and/or by use of an experimental testbed. So, we compare with TCP NewReno the fairness of the congestion control algorithms for 5 high-speed TCP variants -BIC, Cubic, Scalable, High-Speed and Hamilton -on both ns-2 and on an experimental testbed running Linux. In both cases, we use the same TCP code from Linux. We observe some differences between the behaviour of these TCP variants when comparing the testbed results to the results from ns-2, but also note that there is generally good agreement.

This paper presents a case study illustrating successful involvement of a shared online 3D virtual world, for teaching Human Computer Interaction (HCI) as a final year course in an undergraduate curriculum. While there is considerable interest throughout academia in using such multi-user virtual environments (MUVE) for education, academics are experiencing many challenges in exploring various possible use-cases. This study was conducted to identify some of the critical issues such as student perception, privacy, ownership, access to practical work for assessment purposes, maintaining an association between institutional and virtual world identities, and the achievement of learning outcomes through the MUVE approach of teaching

To advance operational legacy systems, with their out-of-date software, distributed data and entrenched business processes, to systems that can take advantage of current Web technologies to give consistent, customized and secure access to existing information bases and legacy systems is a complex and daunting task. The Institutionally Secure Integrated Data Environment (INSIDE) is a collaborative project between the Universities of St Andrews and Durham that is addressing the issues surrounding the development and delivery of integrated systems for large institutions, constrained by the requirement of working with the existing information bases and legacy systems. The work has included an exploration of the incremental evolution of existing systems by building Web-based value-added services upon foundations derived from analysing and modelling the existing legacy systems. Progressing from initial informal models to more formal domain and requirements models in a systematic way, following a meta-process incorporating good practice from domain analysis and requirements engineering has allowed the project to lay the foundation for its development of Web-based services.