The Centre for Adaptive Wireless Systems was founded in 2000 with the granting of TSR strand III funding to three staff members of the Electronic Engineering Department at CIT: Dr. Dirk Pesch, Mr Fergus O'Reilly and Dr. John Barrett. The three founders had identified the opportunity to link their individual research skills in wireless networking, software and hardware to create a research capability of considerably greater impact than the sum of its parts. The CAWS cover three main research areas:

Adaptive Wireless Systems Group	Smart Systems Integration	Embedded Application Cluster

The CAWS has built upon it's unique origins to develop a mission statement that is complementary to the goals of its parent Institute, CIT, and focused upon creating a high impact in specific research topics. The mission is:

• To create highly adaptive, self-organising, mulit-tiered and multi-system distributed wireless communication platforms
• To be effective in applying the platforms to real applications