MadMAC: Building a Reconfiguration Radio Testbed using Commodity 802.11 Hardware

Essential to adaptive devices is the ability to reconfigure Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols to environment conditions and application requirements. We propose MadMAC, a platform for building reconfigurable MAC protocols on commodity 802.11x hardware. Programming on top of MadWiFi, MadMAC transmits packets at configurable time and frame format. In this paper, we build a TDMA-based MAC protocol using MadMAC, and examine the impact of various design parameters. Experimental results show that MadMAC allows flexible control of protocol settings with small processing overhead. We also observe that the TDMA MAC protocol provides 20% throughput improvement over the CSMA protocol in a simple two-node network.