Design, Implementation and Experimental Evaluation of a Wireless MAC Processor over commercial WIFI cards

In this thesis we face the problem of wireless network programmability as a solution for coping with context-dependent optimizations, moving from one-for-all standard solutions to the concept of programmable wireless interfaces. Although the wireless research and academic community has proposed interesting platforms (e.g. based on Software Defined Radio) for pushing forward dynamic reprogrammability of devices, we argue that it is important to identify a tradeoff between programmability space and usability of the programmable interface. In this direction, we introduce the concept of Wireless MAC Processor and developed a running prototype over an ultra-cheap wireless card. Wireless MAC processor is a programmable device which provides a set of stateless Medium Access Control commands, and which embeds a MAC protocol engine in charge of executing a finite state machine able to exploit and compose the sequence of commands forming a desired MAC protocol logic. Wireless MAC Processor (WMP) commands can be considered analogous to the instruction set of an ordinary CPU. They are meant to implement elementary actions, namely MAC operations such as transmit a frame, set timers, etc., which may be then executed in the appropriate sequence and/or under the occurrence of specific events and conditions mandated by a protocol logic. Instead of implementing a specific Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol stack, Wireless MAC processors do support a set of Medium Access Control which can be run-time composed (pro-grammed) through Finite State Machine (FSM), thus providing the desired MAC protocol operation. Flexibility and ease of programmability is thus a consequence of the clear architecture-level decoupling made between what the device is able to do (the pre-installed MAC commands), and what it is instructed at run time, to do (the injected state machine). The WMP platform has been designed and developed within the European project FLAVIA. The WMP implementation has also been released to the research community, together with a graphical tool for defining and compiling MAC state machines.