Driver Level Implementation of TDMA MAC in Long Distance WiFi

Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) MAC protocol in WiFi-based Long Distance (WiLD) networks has proved to be suitable solution in supporting long distance communications. Open source Atheros driver in Linux environment is found to be a flexible platform for implementing TDMA in WiLD networks. The earlier developments over this open source driver is limited to 802.11 a/b/g standards. But, ath9k device driver support is required for the latest 802.11n standard. In this paper, we build a TDMA-based MAC protocol using ath9k driver to achieve long distance communications. The various steps in implementing the protocol is discussed. Also, we examine the performance of the implemented protocol over point-to-point link.