A software-defined MAC architecture for Wi-Fi operating in user space on conventional PCs

The ability to access low-level IEEE 802.11 MAC primitives, and in particular to manage single transmission attempts in software at the user space level, is a prerequisite for many application scenarios based on Wi-Fi and characterized by tight timings constraints. Seamless redundancy, traffic scheduling, and TDMA techniques are just a few significant examples. In this paper, a novel software architecture is defined, called SDMAC, which relies on conventional Linux PCs equipped with off-the-shelf Wi-Fi adapters and provides direct control on frame transmission to applications. Its implementation and evaluation on a real testbed showed that integrating SDMAC in the Linux protocol stack is a valid solution, in terms of the latencies introduced by software and hardware components, and suits a wide range of soft real-time applications.