TinyWifi is a nesC code base extending TinyOS to support Linux powered network nodes. It enables developers to build arbitrary TinyOS applications and protocols and execute them directly on Linux by compiling for the new TinyWifi platform. Using TinyWifi as a TinyOS platform, we expand the applicability and means of evaluation of wireless protocols originally designed for sensornets towards inherently similar Linux driven ad hoc and mesh networks.
Although different in their applications and resource constraints, sensornets and Wi-Fi based multihop networks share inherent similarities: (1) They operate on the same frequency band, (2) experience highly dynamic and bursty links due to radio interferences and other physical influences resulting in unreliable routing paths, (3) each node can only communicate with nodes within its radio range forming a mesh topology, and (4) the intended use cases in both domains demand a reliable and highly scalable communication infrastructure. As a result, the majority of algorithmic concepts and state-of-the-art protocols - including MAC, link estimation and routing - originally designed for sensornets are equally relevant in the Wi-Fi domain and vice versa. It is due to the significant implementation and porting effort that the developers are restricted to build and evaluate their prototypes for a single domain and implicitly assume their applicability in the other.
We introduce TinyWifi, a TinyOS platform supporting Linux driven devices. It allows direct execution of protocol libraries originally developed for a different networking domain. Applications from highly resource constrained sensornets can easily be compiled for resource rich Wi-Fi based networks, thereby making the very rich and mature protocol-repository of TinyOS available for broader wireless research.
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