The Center of Excellence DEWS (Design Methodologies of Embedded Controllers, Wireless Interconnect and Systems-on-chip) is a Research Center established in 2001 at the University of L’Aquila, on the basis of a national competition set up by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR).
The research activities are centered on the investigation of high technologies in the interest of society, with emphasis on the design, implementation and management of wireless sensor and actuator networks. DEWS fosters full cooperation among researchers of different scientific fields essential for reaching specific research objectives in the field of wireless networked embedded systems, e.g., automatic control, electromagnetic fields, analog and digital electronics, information science and telecommunications.
DEWS has established strong research collaborations with some of the most prestigious academic institutions world-wide such as the University of California at Berkeley,  and the Royal Institute of Technology at Stockholm.
Moreover, DEWS has developed and strengthened research cooperation on wireless systems with companies. Within this collaboration framework, the Center has acquired the ability to plan and manage projects of significant complexity.

Service

• Analysis and feasibility for embedded systems applications for monitoring and control.
• Rapid prototyping for short/medium range WSNs for monitoring and control
• Communications protocol design.
• DEWS organizes seminar courses offered to PhD students of the Department of “Ingegneria Elettrica e dell'Informazione”, fosters activities and projects on networked embedded system for the courses in “Laurea Specialistica” (Master's) and is managing a II Level Master's degree in “Technologies, applications and services on heterogeneous radio networks”.

The goal of the EECI Networked Control Laboratory is to offer a specific support to the partners of the HYCON Network of Excellence (http://www.ist-hycon.org), and in general to all the European researchers, in the development and application of hybrid control methodologies for networked control systems that include: modeling and analysis of achievable performance for control over wireless links and adaptive control and resource management to ensure quality of control despite varying network conditions.  More in particular the EECI Networked Control Laboratory will aim at:

• having an impact on specific problems in control over wireless networks,
• demonstrating the applicability of the new methods via case studies and test-beds and disseminating the results and
• the acquired know-how via tight collaboration with industry and other research institutions that include research exchange programs, training and workshop organization.

The activity at L’ Aquila will provide motivations and offer requirements to the EECI research community coming from important domains of application in industrial segments such as automotive, industrial engineering, robotics and avionics.

Service
The laboratory provides four main services within:

• Offering an experimental infrastructure including hardware and software tools for WSN to HYCON researchers interested in control over wireless networks.

• Define and make available a service platform for distributed monitoring and control that abstracts the wireless network. Thus, developing control applications on wireless networks would be much easier than it is today.

• Coordinate development and implementation of a middleware platform that includes the services defined above.

• Integrating within a web-service all test beds currently available in partners’ labs participating to the lab.

Beyond the activity related to the expansion of the experimental test-bed at L’Aquila, we plan to leverage the test beds that are currently available at the sites of the interested partners. In doing so, the Networked Control Laboratory will use the middleware and the layers of abstraction that have been identified in to offer an abstract interface to all test beds of HYCON.

• Development platforms for WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks)
• Development platforms for Mobile Communications
• Development kit for RFiD
• Servers and desktops/laptops
• Development kit for UWB (Time Domain)
• Laboratory instrumentation
• Wide band digital scope