Contiki80211: An IEEE 802.11 Radio Link Layer for the Contiki OS
We believe that the existing 802.11 standards can be optimized (especially in terms of energy-efficiency) to make Wi-Fi suitable for a wide range of IoT applications.
August 20, 2014
IEEE International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems (ICESS) 2014
Authors
Ioannis Glaropoulos (Disney Research)
Vladimir Vukadinovic (Disney Research)
Stefan Mangold (Disney Research)
Contiki80211: An IEEE 802.11 Radio Link Layer for the Contiki OS
We believe that the existing 802.11 standards can be optimized (especially in terms of energy-efficiency) to make Wi-Fi suitable for a wide range of IoT applications. However, there is a lack of low cost embedded platforms that can be used for experimentation with 802.11 MAC protocol. The vast majority of low-power Wi-Fi modules for embedded systems has closed source firmware and protocol stack implementations, which prevents implementation and testing of new protocol features. Here we describe Contiki80211, an open source 802.11 radio link layer implementation for Contiki OS, whose purpose is to enable experimentation with 802.11 MAC layer management mechanisms on embedded devices, such as sensor motes and IoT smart objects. Contiki80211 implements a number of optimizations in order to run on hosts that are constrained in terms of memory and processing power. We evaluate its performance (memory usage, interrupt processing latency, etc.) on an embedded platform.
