Automated Development of Cooperative MAC Protocols

作者：Lichte Hermann Simon^*; Valentin Stefan; Karl Holger

来源：Mobile Networks and Applications, 2010, 15(6): 769-785.

DOI：10.1007/s11036-009-0210-5

• protocol specification
• protocol implementation
• protocol compiler
• Medium Access Control (MAC)
• cooperative relaying

Letting users cooperate is a promising approach to improve reliability and throughput in wireless networks, but it has not yet made the transition into practice. Unlike conventional wireless communication, cooperation distributes each single transmission among multiple users and channels. Consequently, a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol developer has to cope with various new, heavily distributed protocol functions that are tedious to implement and to debug. To untie this complex development process, we propose to automate its most error-prone parts: Implementation of MAC automata, analysis, and code generation. To do so, we formalize cooperative MAC protocols by a new, easy-to-use specification language and propose a compiler for which we construct various backends to automatically analyze validity and performance of the specification and to translate the specified protocols into program code for simulators and even Software-Defined Radio (SDR) prototypes. All this provides a lightweight, heavily automated development process that quickly turns a cooperative MAC protocol specification into a practical implementation.

• 出版日期2010-12