Control Architecture for Wireless MAC Processor Networking

Abstract

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 abstraction interface recently pro- posed by the Wireless MAC Processor (WMP) architecture, and some flow-control concepts similar to the Openflow model for defining MAC adaptation policies. A sim- ple control architecture for disseminating and activating new policies among multiple nodes is validated in an experimental testbed.