A Rapid Prototyping Platform for Wireless Medium Access Control Protocols

Packet broadcast networks are in widespread use in modern wireless communication systems and medium access control (MAC) is a key functionality within these. Substantial research effort has been and continues to be invested into the study of existing protocols and the development of new and specialised ones, however researchers are restricted in their studies by an absence of suitable wireless MAC protocol development methods. We describe a platform which allows rapid prototyping and evaluation of wireless medium access control protocols, based around a field programmable gate array (FPGA) with embedded processor, and an IEEE 802.11b-compatible transceiver. The hardware architecture along with supporting firmware and software provides for a short design cycle in implementation of custom MAC protocols, and a large degree of flexibility in hardware/software co-design trade-offs. Measurement and evaluation are integral to the system design with facilities for accurate time-stamping within the hardware, and ability to synchronise timing across physically distributed nodes using the Global Positioning System (GPS). The architecture allows measurement within a node which is actively participating in a network.