TinyWiFi: making network protocol evaluation portable across multiple phy-link layers

Multihop wireless networks, such as sensor-, ad hoc- and mesh-networks, although different share some common characteristics. All these networks exhibit link dynamics. Protocols designed for these wireless networks must overcome the challenge of link dynamics and the resulting churn in network topology. Due to structural and topological similarities, protocols developed for one class of wireless network should also be applicable in the other classes. However, network-layer protocols are usually developed for and tested in only one class of wireless network due to the lack of a platform that allows testing of protocols across different classes of networks. As a result, we unnecessarily constrain the range of settings and scenarios in which we test network protocols. In this paper, we present TinyWifi, a platform for executing native sensornet protocols on Linux-driven wireless devices. TinyWifi builds on nesC code base that abstracts from TinyOS and enables the execution of nesC-based protocols in Linux. Using this abstraction, we expand the applicability and means of protocol execution from one class of wireless network to another without re-implementation. We demonstrate the generality of TinyWifi by evaluating four well-established protocols on IEEE 802.11 and 802.15.4 based testbeds using a single implementation.