Dr. Dharma P. Agrawal joined the department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science on August 1, 1998 as an Ohio Board of Regents Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. Since joining, he decided to concentrate on Wireless and Mobile Computing area so that wireless computing can be done in a distributed manner.

That led to the birth of CDMC, the lab concentrating on Wireless and Mobile Computing area. He moved his office from 800 Rhodes to 816 ERC in October 1998. It took several months to have space cleared for CDMC in ERC 817 and started the research activity by recruiting three MS students. He also started offering a graduate course in Wireless and Mobile Computing area and hired Dr. Qing-an Zeng as a post-doctoral fellow in November 1999. He also took active part in recruiting outstanding doctoral students from India, China and Brazil and was able to establish an excellent research center in Wireless area. Since then, the number of students have continuously grown and many times surpassed over 30 members. There have been many post-doctoral fellows and short and long term visitors around the world and our graduates have been employed at leading wireless industries and institutions.

Few years later, the laboratory was expanded to another laboratory space in ERC and was later relocated to ERC 829. Continued research in various aspects of wireless area and development of new courses led to authorship new text-books, which have been translated in many languages and adopted around the world. We have recruited students from other countries like Sri Lanka, Nepal, etc. and continue to utilize wireless technologies by deploying CO sensor network around the UC campus and work is in progress on 26-node Wireless Mesh Network test-bed. The Center is now located on 8th floor of Old Chemistry building in rooms 828 to 832.

We have also contributed to use of wireless sensors in automatically generating music by capturing instantaneous movement of dancers in CCM. Work is also in progress in defining ways to detect the boundary of an event such as wild forest fire, etc. using minimum number of sensors.

Some of the important contributions of the CDMC group include Performance Analysis for Preemptive and Priority Reservation Handoff Scheme in Integrated Service Based Wireless Mobile Networks, analytical modeling of IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Coordination Function, Energy Efficient Communication Architecture for Bluetooth Ad hoc Networks, Piconet Interference Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Bluetooth MAC Protocol, Threshold and Identity-based Security Scheme for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, Dynamic Probabilistic Broadcasting in MANETs, Energy Efficient MAC Protocol with Spatial Reusability for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, Performance Analysis of Handoff Schemes with Preemptive and Non-preemptive Channel Borrowing in Integrated Wireless Cellular Networks, Communication Architecture for Processing Spatio-temporal Continuous Queries in Sensor Networks, Above Packet Level Admission Control and Bandwidth Allocation for IEEE 802.16 Wireless, Decentralized Key Generation Scheme for Cellular-based Heterogeneous Wireless Ad hoc Networks, Air Time Fairness for IEEE Multi-Rate Networks, Stochastic Automata Rate Adaptation for IEEE 802.11 Networks, Coverage and Lifetime Optimization of Wireless Sensor Networks with Gaussian Distribution, Adaptive state-based multi-radio multi-channel multi-path routing in Wireless Mesh Networks, Range-free Localization Algorithm using Expected Hop Progress in Wireless Sensor Networks, analytical formulation of directional antenna in ad hoc networks, aggregation of sensor data using aggregation polynomial, use of matrix-type key distribution for secured communication in sensor networks, Exploring Load Balancing in Heterogeneous Networks by Rate Distribution, Optimizing Deployment of Internet Gateways in Wireless Mesh Networks, and A Framework for Statistical Wireless Spectrum Occupancy Modeling.

Our recent work is concentrating on wireless sensor networks and application of body area networks for health care applications. The group members have worked on quantizing the health of athletes by integrating pressure sensors in the shoe soles that indicate instantaneous pressure exerted by different parts of the leg. We have also used sensors in identifying freezing of gates by Parkinson disease patients at their homes. Our newest task is to identify strategies in equipping helmets in minimizing the impact of collision that could cause concussion in athletes.