Making a case for flexible 802.11 architectures

In the past years, researchers have been advocating for flexible 802.11 devices that dynamically adapt to the varying network conditions, looking for efficient alternatives to the 802.11 standard MAC. In this work we demonstrate that this flexibility is readily available at the MAC level, and its operation can be tuned by re-programming the firmware inside the wireless chipsets that are built on relatively generic hardware modules. We show this by implementing the new amendment IEEE 802.11aa in legacy equipments by simply coding the frame exchange schemes at the firmware level. Nevertheless, we claim that the lack of flexibility in the way these modules interact results in a bottleneck that severely degrades performance. In our work, we prove this inefficiency of the 802.11 hardware architecture that hinders high throughput features, as in our case study of 802.11aa reliable multicast. To solve this problem, we provide new directions for the revision of the current hardware architecture and propose a new vision for the future design of wireless chipsets.