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= Tutorial: Building a Completely Custom MAC =

A major feature of [wiki:802.11 the 802.11 Reference Design] is its compliance to the 802.11 standard to enable interaction with commercial Wi-Fi devices. This is the design in its "reference" state -- a known quantity that is ''intended'' to be modified to suit the needs of research applications. In our [wiki:802.11/wlan_exp/app_notes other app notes], we made small modifications to the design and characterized how those design changes manifested using the [wiki:802.11/wlan_exp WLAN Experiments Framework]. Ultimately, however, those design changes were small and the design you ended up with was a mildly tweaked 802.11 implementation.

This application note is fundamentally different -- we will build a completely non-standard MAC from scratch and use the [wiki:802.11/wlan_exp WLAN Experiments Framework] to characterize our novel design. The intent of this application note is to act as a tutorial. It is a step-by-step example of how to build something that really does not even resemble the standard 802.11 MAC.