Novel design and implementation of IEEE 802.11 medium access control

We introduce a pioneering design of medium access control (MAC) of IEEE 802.11b. During the design, we move some of the non-timing critical MAC functions into Windows drivers on host side, while left timing critical MAC functions implemented as MAC controller of the network interface card (NIC). The NIC side MAC consists of firmware, which controls the operation of MAC controller and protocol accelerator, which accomplishes real-time MAC functions. The whole system architecture of our design including the host side software driver and NIC side hardware is presented in detail. Some implementation issues are also discussed in this paper. The whole system is now completely done and the prototype is already built in FPGA. Testing shows that the novel design satisfies the performance requirements and it gains more benefits than traditional design.