A bridging architecture for wireless networked appliances

The ultimate objective of networking is to enable the provision and interaction of network services. Therefore, any effort that addresses interworking in any layer should consider the enhancement of the way services are provided to the end user. To be able to realise such a vision in the networked appliances and home networking domain and indeed in any domain, a common interworking layer needs to be adopted. This can best be achieved by providing an interworking functionality in the lower layers of the protocol stack. That would ultimately provide a common networking layer for the applications. This allows all the devices to use the same IP addressing domain and therefore be considered as operating on one network. In doing so, we would enable services to interact seamlessly without the needs of provision for roaming and handover functionalities. In this paper we present our design and implementation of a wireless networked appliances MAC bridge that provides such interworking functionality.