In response to the growing demand for faster and higher quality wireless applications and infrastructure, Purdue University has developed the Center for Wireless Systems and Applications (CWSA). Established as a university-wide initiative in 2002, CWSA follows a comprehensive approach to research and education in wireless that interconnects resources, ideas, and expertise.

CWSA supports innovative, large-scale, multidisciplinary research activities, educates tomorrow's engineering leaders, and provides an environment that fosters teamwork and strategic collaborations to accelerate development of wireless technologies, systems, and applications.

CWSA embraces all three aspects of Purdue's academic mission:

• Discovery: Conduct the fundamental and applied research necessary to develop innovative end-to-end solutions in wireless communications and networking.
• Learning: Create innovative, multi-disciplinary educational programs focused on wireless systems at the undergraduate and graduate level.
• Engagement: Foster partnerships that involve the Center, users of wireless systems, government, not-for-profit organizations, and industry in the identification, development, and testing of new wireless applications.

Within this academic mission, the Center's resources are focused on cross-layer development across six thrust areas, as illustrated below:

• devices and materials
• low power electronics
• communications
• networking
• multimedia traffic
• security

This aim of the Center's research is basically mobile anytime-anywhere communications in support of human interaction, entertainment, sensing, computing, decision-making, and control. This involves the seamless integration of various services, as illustrated below:

CWSA's strengths in this regard are best summed-up by Steve Gillig of Motorola:
"Seamless integration is not a continuity of bits, but a continuity of experience."

There are fundamental impediments to accomplishing our goals of 100X or greater improvements in overall performance. These include:

• Wireless bandwidth
• Power/energy
• Time-varying communications channels, fading, etc.
• Interoperability/transparent integration/service/software
• Fault tolerance
• Scalability: what are the performance limits of purely distributed solutions?
• Security: what are the fundamental trade-offs between overhead, security, bandwidth, and power?
• Cost

In less than four years, CWSA has grown into one of the largest and most interdisciplinary centers at Purdue. With more than 25 core faculty from over 20 disciplines and 60+ additional affiliated faculty from 13 schools, the center has been able to integrate across many disciplines to develop unique research projects, courses, and applications. participate in CWSA programs. Ness Shroff, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and an expert in wireline and wireless networks, and traffic engineering, serves as the Center's director. Professors Ed Coyle (ECE), Susanne Hambrusch (CS), Jim Krogmeier (ECE), and Kaushik Roy (ECE) serve as co-directors and assist with all aspects of the Center.

CWSA core faculty have received research and education grants from the National Science Foundation, the DoD's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Army Research Office (ARO), Motorola (including UPR grants and other joint research activities), the Motorola Foundation, Tellabs, Cisco, Intel, Verizon, Raytheon, and many other companies. The total value of these grants exceeds $14 million. CWSA faculty members have been invited to give keynote speeches, distinguished lectures, and publications from CWSA faculty have received several best paper awards from conferences and journals.

The following are some of the programs created and supported by the Center:

The e-Stadium project described earlier has continued to attract national attention and has been featured in many Purdue and national publications, including Forbes magazine. Full information about the project, its achievements, and current activities is available at http://estadium.purdue.edu/, the official Purdue University web site for this project, and at http://shay.ecn.purdue.edu/~estadium/Pages/home.htm.

CWSA has established a new Area of Specialization in Wireless Systems Engineering for the Master's program in ECE. The 17 month Specialization is built around a core of four courses: Mobile Communications, Wireless Networking, Introduction to Wireless Components and Systems, and Digital Communications. The experiments for these courses are taught in two new laboratories: the Wireless Microwave Circuits Lab and the Wireless Communications Laboratory.

CWSA has created two undergraduate courses related to wireless systems: The Wireless Revolution - a senior-level course; and the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) in Wireless course, a design course. The Wireless VIP course supports teams of undergraduate students that work on wireless applications. One of the current VIP projects is the e-Stadium project where a faculty-led student design team is working in partnership with the Information Technology and Athletic departments to deploy a wireless network within the 62,500 seat Ross Ade football stadium. The team develops applications for this network, including the viewing of video clips of game highlights on attendees' PDAs and video-capable cellphones.

A large number of CWSA research projects are underway. The topics they address include: MEMS-based RF devices, OFDM- and MIMO-based communication systems, sensor and ad-hoc networking, mesh-networking, synchronization, cross-layer design of wireless networks, reliability and security of wireless systems, the design of GPS-based systems, and the scalability of wireless multimedia applications.

An annual workshop is hosted by CWSA each November.

CWSA has an external Advisory Board comprised of distinguished experts from industry, DoD, and academia. The Advisory Board provides advice to the CWSA leadership on its efforts in research, education and engagement.