Wireless card virtualization: From virtual NICs to virtual MAC machines

Virtualization has been a hot topic in computer science this last 10 years, and a key enabler to the recent advances. By technically enabling the Cloud paradigm, virtualization is becoming an inspiring source for the whole IT industry. At the same moment the virtualization of commodity PC was envisioned, Software Defined Radio started as a huge promise of efficient wireless transmission hardware. Unfortunately, the pace of innovation has still to reach the one of the PC virtualization. Yet, there is a another option. The current state of the art of hardware and software of wireless adapter in standard PC reveals interesting capabilities in terms of unused wireless capacity, processing power and in more general way, bringing new functionalities at no extra cost. The actual hardware can be used to provide hardware-assisted virtualization, in a manner very similar to PC virtualization. In this paper we review the current virtualization proposal and bring some insight of some extra capabilities provided by hardware.