Despite the intense past and ongoing research and development work on ad hoc wireless networks, adequate principles, tools , and methodologies for designing reliable MANETs that meet given requirements are still missing. To date, most protocol design and analysis approaches for MANETs have essentially decoupled the ``network'' from the ``physical medium.'' The results from this approach have led to the false belief that system theoretic tools (that focus for example on dynamical system behavior) may lead to scalable methods of design and operation. The focus of most protocol-design approaches for MANETs and sensor networks continue to view a network as a graph in which interference at a receiver occurs only over the links with its ``one hop'' neighbors (those nodes whose transmissions the receiver can decode on the basis of signal attenuation), which leads to the erroneous model that interference is only due to nodes in close proximity to the receiver. These approaches apply methods of analysis that are similar to those used to study the Internet. In reality, interference at a receiver is a complex function of the characteristics of the wireless media and terrain, and the transmissions allowed by the protocol stack from any source in the network. On the other extreme, communication theorists either continue to focus on point-to-point models (or at most on ``uplink'' or ``downlink'' models of cellular paradigms) or pose Shannon-theoretic questions for large networks that are as yet impossible to analyze, and provide insight into the design of sparse networks or networks of moderate sizes.
The DAWN (Dynamic Ad-hoc Wireless Networks) project is developing a general theory of complex and dynamic wireless communication networks. To accomplish this, DAWN adopts a very different approach than those followed in the past and summarized above. DAWN constitutes what is arguably one of the most ambitious research teams of experts ever assembled that can mount a truly cross-disciplinary approach incorporating the effects of the physical layer explicitly into the modeling, analysis, and control of wireless communication networks. DAWN will systematically redefine and reorganize existing models, protocols and controls, and develop new ones in a framework that guarantees realism and cross-layer consistency to enable the efficient design of such complex wireless systems as those required by the Army. The models, tools, algorithms, and protocols developed in DAWN will provide transformational improvements to the way in which a network-centric battlefield is managed in the future.
