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

Abstract

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 to test the functional thoroughness of the programming interface provided by the MAC–Engine archi- tecture. Finally, we introduce an experimental PFSM de- velopment framework, that can translate a graphical PFSM representation into an optimized bytecode.