A Flexible Framework for Wireless Medium Access Protocols

Authors: C. Hunter, J. Camp, P. Murphy, A. Sabharwal, C. Dick

Abstract

In this paper, we present a framework for Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol development and performance evaluation. The framework, developed for the Rice University Wireless Open-Access Research Platform (WARP), allows us to interface a large class of medium access protocols with custom physical layer (PHY) implementations, thereby providing a flexible and high-performance research tool. MAC protocols for our framework are written in C and targeted to embedded PowerPC cores within the Xilinx Virtex II-Pro class of FPGAs. A key innovation is a flexible interface between the PHY and the MAC capable of exposing user-defined parameters to either layer, thus enabling cross-layer research.

@inproceedings{Hunter:2006,
	Author = {C. Hunter and J. Camp and P. Murphy and A. Sabharwal and C. Dick },
	Booktitle = {Proc. 2006 Asilomar Conference on Signals and Systems},
	Title = {A Flexible Framework for Wireless Medium Access Protocols},
	Year = {2006}}

Code

WARPMAC is still maintained as part of the OFDM Reference Design. The latest WARPMAC code is available in the WARP repository: PlatformSupport/WARPMAC