wiki:802.11/FAQ

Version 13 (modified by murphpo, 11 years ago) (diff)

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The 802.11 Reference Design and its documentation are under active development by the Mango team. The current release should be considered a beta- updates with bug fixes, API changes, new features and other refinements will be posted frequently. Please check the downloads page for the latest updates and post any questions about the design to the forums.

802.11 Reference Design: Frequently Asked Questions

If you have questions about the 802.11 Reference Design that aren't address below or elsewhere in this user guide, please post to the forums and we'll answer as quickly as possible.

What parts of the 802.11 standard are implemented?

Our implementation focuses on the OFDM PHY and DCF MAC. We tried to choose a subset of these specifications which are feasible to implement and provide the most utility to wireless networking researchers. We plan to continue developing the design in the coming months. Feedback is welcome on which features in the standard would be most useful in future releases.

The IEEE 802.11 standard is huge (2700 page PDF). Implementing the entire standard on WARP is infeasible, and frankly not all that useful as a research tool.

The specifics of the current implementation are discussed in the PHY and MAC pages of this user guide.

What hardware is supported?

The WARP 802.11 Reference Design is supported on Mango WARP v3 hardware.

Previous generations of WARP hardware are not supported, as the design requires tools and FPGA features which preclude porting to Virtex-II Pro or Virtex-4 FPGAs.

How is the WARP 802.11 Reference Design licensed?

The source code and models for the 802.11 Reference Design are distributed under the terms of the Mango Reference Design License. For any questions about the license terms please contact Mango Communications.

It is our intention that users should be free to do the following with the 802.11 Reference Design

  • Use the Reference Design on Mango hardware for teaching and academic research
  • Modify the Reference MAC and PHY source code
  • Publish results from experiments using the Reference Design
  • Share customized versions of our MAC and PHY with other users of the Reference Design

Please note that the license requires this design only be used on hardware manufactured by Mango Communications. We recognize this requirement diverges from true open source. It is the only approach we can conceive that justifies the significant investment of resources to develop and support a complex design distributed at no cost. We want to provide hardware and reference designs that enable great research. We can't do this as free IP suppliers for competing platforms.

What encryption schemes are supported?

None.

This could be an interesting future extension, but is way outside our areas of expertise. As best we can figure, it also isn't necessary for most MAC/PHY experiments.

Is the WARP 802.11 Reference Design Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™?

No.

Wi-Fi® is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry association which seeks to ensure compliance and inter-operability of wireless networking equipment. Our design is intended to be a starting point for researchers, not a wireless device for end-users. The point of this design is to enable experiments with extensions to the standard MAC/PHY. Pursuit of Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ status doesn't facilitate this.