MAClets: Active MAC Protocols over hard-coded devices

Abstract

We introduce MAClets, software programs uploaded and executed on-demand over wireless cards, and devised to change the card’s real-time medium access control operation. MAClets permit seamless reconfiguration of the MAC stack, so as to adapt it to mutated context and spectrum conditions and perform tailored performance optimizations hardly accountable by an once-for-all protocol stack design. Following traditional active networking principles, MAClets can be directly conveyed within data packets and executed on hard-coded devices acting as virtual MAC machines. Indeed, rather than executing a predefined protocol, we envision a new architecture for wireless cards based on a protocol interpreter (enabling code portability) and a powerful API. Experiments involving the distribution of MAClets within data packets, and their execution over commodity WLAN cards, show the flexibility and viability of the proposed concept.