The Center for Wireless Networking's flagship project is an ambitious, highly interdisciplinary effort whose charter is to re-think the way that wireless networks and mobile appliances are designed and implemented.

A key part of its mission is to uncover the fundamental limits that govern such systems, and the forces that shape their evolution. In turn, these insights are guiding the development of a broad set of novel cross-layer design techniques to improve reliability, responsiveness, security, scalability, and energy-efficiency. The resulting improvements are expected to enable important new applications involving streaming media and other high-data rate content.

A hallmark of this project is its emphasis on pursuing innovation by bringing together diverse groups and research communities that have traditionally worked more independently. Indeed, MIT and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories are using this joint effort to re-invent the model for academic-industrial collaboration, and pioneer innovative new approaches to such interaction.