MAC–Engine: a new architecture for executing MAC algorithms on commodity WiFi hardware

In this demo, we prove that the flexibility supported by off–the–shelf IEEE 802.11 hardware can be significantly ex- tended if we move the control of the MAC programming interface from the driver to the firmware, i.e. from the host CPU to the card CPU. To this purpose, we introduce the concept of MAC–Engine, that is an executor of Pro- grammable Finite State Machines (PFSM) implemented at the firmware level: we show how the card itself can support different protocol logics thanks to PFSM bytecode repre- sentations that can be dynamically injected inside the card memory at run-time without incurring in down time issues or network disconnect events. We provide different PFSM examples in order…

WMPS: A Positioning System for Localizing Legacy 802.11 Devices

The huge success of location-aware applications calls for the quick development of a positioning system alternative to GPS for indoor localization based on existing technologies such as 802.11 wireless networks. In this paper we propose WMPS, the Wireless MAC Processor Positioning System, that is a localization system running on off-the-shelf 802.11 Access Points and based on time-of-flight ranging of users’ standard terminals. We prove through extensive experiments that propagation delays can be measured with the accuracy required by indoor applications despite the different noise components that can affect the result, like latencies of the hardware transreceivers, multi- path, ACK jitters…

Method of changing the operation of wireless network nodes

Control Architecture for Wireless MAC Processor Networking

Abstract: In these years, the proliferation of unplanned WLANs is creating the need of implementing different adaptation strategies for improving the network per- formance under mutating and evolving interference scenarios. Many vendors pro- pose undisclosed MAC/PHY optimization solutions, such as ambient noise immunity schemes, dynamic tuning of operating channels and contention parameters, etc., rely- ing on low-level implementations in the card hardware/firmware. In this paper we envision a new solution for expressing and implementing high-level adaptation policies in WLANs, in contrast to the current approaches based on vendor- specific implementations. We exploit the hardware abstracti…