A Prototyping Environment for Wireless Multihop Networks

Relative to the impressive number of proposals addressing the multitude of challenges raised by IEEE 802.11-based wireless networks, few have known real implementation. In wireless networks, due especially to the unpredictable nature of the wireless channel, bridging theory and practice is far from trivial. In this paper, we advocate including prototyping in the design process of wireless protocols. The goal is to speed up the design process and to help validating novel solutions under real conditions. To this end, we introduce Prawn, a tool that allows rapid prototyping of wireless network protocols. The basic idea behind Prawn is to provide a set of basic building blocks that implement common functionalities needed by a wide range of wireless protocols (e.g., neighbor discovery, link quality assessment, message transmission and reception). Besides these ready-to-use blocks, Prawn also provides a standard API that allows protocol designers easy access to the Prawn primitives. Through a number of examples, we showcase Prawn as a simple, yet powerful tool for fast prototyping of wireless network protocols.