Media access control development platform for wireless LANs

We introduce a Media Access Control (MAC) development platform for wireless LANs that (1) complements traditional simulation and analytical tools, and (2) provides a pioneering platform in academia based on the de-facto standard Windows operating system in addition to the legacy Unix environment. Our implementation includes two main modules (1) a wireless LAN network interface card (NIC) that includes only transmit/receive functionality and (2) a NIC device driver in which we have implemented a flexible plug-in module which allows us easy MAC protocol implementation. The proposed approach has the advantage that the testing of the protocol is performed in realistic environments, i.e., we use real traffic coming from off-the-shelf applications and a real wireless channel. We have implemented the proposed approach using Harris PRISM PC cards with the AMD PCnet microcontroller and Windows PCs. We introduce the implementation procedure and the performance results obtained from a wireless point-to-point experimental setup.