Innovation-to-Commercialization Success Story at Discovery 2006

Toronto, Canada - February 27, 2006: EION Wireless was pleased to present the journey from innovation to successful commercialization of its Ad-Hoc networking technology at the Ontario Centers of Excellence, Discovery 2006 conference. Through successful completion of this project, EION has been a launch pad for delivering innovative research on Adaptive Intelligent Routing (AIR) directly to the marketplace. The eighteen-month Ad Hoc project was made possible with resources from EION, three Canadian universities, and two government agencies. The first result of the project is a finished product, which was sold and delivered to one of EION's customers - marking the end of the innovation to commercialization cycle.

The initial goal of the Ad-Hoc project was to design and develop an intelligent routing system that provides robust end-to-end connectivity over various networking topologies and technologies and to build a prototype of this Adaptive Intelligent Routing (AIR) technology. EION and its partners achieved these goals and were able to contribute towards a finished product for one of EION’s customers. Through this project, EION Inc. has become a model on how to utilize advanced R&D for commercialization in a medium enterprise environment.

"We need entrepreneurs and investors willing to take risks. And we need leaders who understand the value of a new discovery and how to build a business plan to bring it to market." said Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario, in his keynote address at the conference, "We need to take complex ideas -- and turn them into products and services that clearly make sense in the marketplace."

The project drew on research from Prof. Thomas Kunz, Prof. Changcheng Huang, Prof. Chung-Horng Lung and Prof. Sivarama Dandamudi from Carleton University, as well as several graduate students. The funding for the project came in part from EION Inc., with matching funds from CITO (Communications and Information Technology Ontario) and Precarn. CITO is one of the five centers that make up the Ontario Centers of Excellence (OCE).

"It is very satisfying to see interesting ideas created together by industry and universities successfully applied in the marketplace with such tremendous results," says Anand Srinivasan, Director of Engineering at EION. "Some of the students involved have received jobs directly as a result of this project, so it has not only been a success for EION, but for these students as well."

EION’s Ad Hoc solution consists of several autonomous routers that are capable of creating a highly mobile self-organizing, self-healing network - able to operate at high speed without dropping mission critical packets. Ad-Hoc networking has many exciting applications including battle management applications, emergency response teams communication, and airborne defense networks. This announcement does not mark the end of the Ad Hoc Project, but rather a start, as further developments are currently underway to improve traffic engineering and fault tolerance.

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