Search results for "Network interface"
showing 10 items of 13 documents
Wireless MAC processors: programming MAC protocols on commodity hardware
2012
Programmable wireless platforms aim at responding to the quest for wireless access flexibility and adaptability. This paper introduces the notion of wireless MAC processors. Instead of implementing a specific MAC protocol stack, Wireless MAC processors do support a set of Medium Access Control “commands” which can be run-time composed (programmed) through software-defined state machines, thus providing the desired MAC protocol operation. We clearly distinguish from related work in this area as, unlike other works which rely on dedicated DSPs or programmable hardware platforms, we experimentally prove the feasibility of the wireless MAC processor concept over ultra-cheap commodity WLAN hardw…
Wi-Sense: a passive human activity recognition system using Wi-Fi and convolutional neural network and its integration in health information systems
2021
AbstractA human activity recognition (HAR) system acts as the backbone of many human-centric applications, such as active assisted living and in-home monitoring for elderly and physically impaired people. Although existing Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition methods report good results, their performance is affected by the changes in the ambient environment. In this work, we present Wi-Sense—a human activity recognition system that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to recognize human activities based on the environment-independent fingerprints extracted from the Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI). First, Wi-Sense captures the CSI by using a standard Wi-Fi network interface car…
Revealing transmit diversity mechanisms and their side-effects in commercial IEEE 802.11 cards
2008
Service differentiation in WLAN has been traditionally faced at the MAC layer. However, some PHY layer parameters, such as the transmission power, the antenna, and the modulation/coding scheme, have a deep impact on network performance. Since the criterion for selecting these parameters is left to the vendor specific implementations, the performance spread of most experimental results about 802.11 WLAN could be affected by vendor proprietary schemes. The focus of this paper is an experimental analysis of the undisclosed antenna diversity mechanisms employed by some widely used cards (namely, the Atheros and Intel based cards), and a thorough understanding of the optimization goals which gui…
An evaluation of switched ethernet and linux traffic control for real-time transmission
2008
Switched Ethernet networks are spreading to industrial environments more are more. The current trend is using them at all levels of a factory, replacing this way field-buses and other industrial networks. Switched Ethernet lacks the drawback of the non-deterministic collision resolution of coax cabling. However there are still some sources of indeterminism, mostly due to contention problems in message queues at switches and network interfaces. These problems can be dealt with using traffic control mechanisms for packet prioritisation and scheduling. These features have been largely inaccessible in Ethernet for a long time but, nowadays, they are widely available in industrial switches and a…
Gigabit Ethernet backbones with active loops
2001
The current standard Ethernet switches are based on the Spanning Tree (ST) protocol. Their most important restriction is that they can not work when the topology has active loops. In fact, the ST protocol selects a tree from the real topology by blocking the links that are not involved in the tree. This restriction produces a network traffic unbalancing behavior saturating those link near the root switch while rest of links will be idle or with a very low utilization. This paper proposes a new transparent switch protocol for Gigabit Ethernet backbones that considerably improves the performance of current ones. The proposed protocol is named ALOR for Active Loops and Optimal Routing. ALOR pr…
A low-cost embedded IDS to monitor and prevent Man-in-the-Middle attacks on wired LAN environments
2007
A man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack is, in the scope of a LAN, a technique where an attacker is able to redirect all traffic between two hosts of that same LAN for packet sniffing or data manipulation, without the end hosts being aware of it. Usually these attacks exploit security flaws in the implementation of the ARP protocol at hosts. Up to now, detecting such attacks required setting up a machine with special-purpose software for this task. As an additional problem, few intrusion detection systems (IDS) are able to prevent MitM attacks. In this work we present a low-cost embedded IDS which, when plugged into a switch or hub, is able to detect and/or prevent MitM attacks automatically and …
DEMO: Unconventional WiFi-ZigBee communications without gateways
2014
Nowadays, the overcrowding of ISM bands is becoming an evident limitation for the performance and widespread usage of 802.11 and 802.15.4 technologies. In this demo, we prove that it is possible to opportunistically exploit the inter-technology interference between 802.11 and 802.15.4 to build an unconventional low-rate communication channel and signalling protocol, devised to improve the performance of each contending technology. Differently from previous solutions, inter-technology communications do not require the deployment of a gateway with two network interfaces, but can be activated (when needed) directly between two heterogeneous nodes, e.g. a WiFi node and a ZigBee node. This capab…
A readout unit for high rate applications
2002
The LHCb readout unit (RU) is a custom entry stage to the readout network of a data-acquisition or trigger system. It performs subevent building from multiple link inputs toward a readout network via a PCI network interface or alternatively toward a high-speed link, via an S-link interface. Incoming event fragments are derandomized, buffered and assembled into single subevents. This process is based on a low-overhead framing convention and matching of equal event numbers. Programmable logic is used both in the input and output stages of the RU module, which may be configured either as a data-link multiplexer or as entry stage to a readout or trigger network. All FPGAs are interconnected via…
Experimental Assessment of the Backoff Behavior of Commercial IEEE 802.11b Network Cards
2007
It has been observed that different IEEE 802.11 commercial cards produced by different vendors experience different performance, either when accessing alone the channel, as well as when competing against each other. These differences persist also when thorough measurement methodologies (such as RF shielding, laptop rotation, etc) are applied, and alignment of the environmental factors (same laptop models, traffic generators, etc) is carried out. This paper provides an extensive experimental characterization of the backoff operation of six commercial NIC cards. It suggests a relevant methodological approach, namely a repeatable, well defined, set of experiments, for such a characterization. …
An Experimental Testbed and Methodology for Characterizing IEEE 802.11 Network Cards
2006
It has been observed that IEEE 802.11 commercial cards produced by different vendors show a different behavior in terms of perceived throughput or access delay. Performance differences are evident both when the cards contend alone to the channel, and when heterogeneous cards contend together. Since the performance misalignment does not disappear by averaging the environmental factors (such as propagation conditions, laptop models, traffic generators, etc), it is evident that the well known throughput-fairness property of the DCF protocol is not guaranteed in actual networks. In this paper we propose a methodological approach devised to experimentally characterize the IEEE 802.11 commercial …