Integration of Atheros ath5k device driver in wireless ad-hoc router

Research in Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) has been in-progress towards real-time implementation, such as routing protocols, and device drivers for wireless cards. This paper presents and discusses a real architecture of mobile wireless ad-hoc routers on open-source Linux platform. An exploration of Atheros ath5k driver for wireless ad-hoc routers is shown in three-fold. Firstly, operations of WLAN MAC layer (IEEE 802.11), both in the infrastructure mode and the infrastructure-less (ad-hoc) mode, are described and analyzed. Secondly, the source code of ath5k device driver is analyzed and discussed on different characteristics. These ones include: i) data structures to be used in the ath5k, ii) reception and transmission packet flows, iii) configuration flow. Finally, realistic scenarios are presented to illustrate for the operations of ath5k device driver, and to collect statistical wireless information.