Programmable Medium Access Control for Wireless Networks

The field of wireless communication is changing rapidly, with increasing numbers of wireless applications being touted as everyday staples in the future. Some examples of these applications include Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Internet Of Things (IoT), tactile internet, smart power grids, unmanned traffic management systems, remote medical procedures, disaster network deployment, sensor networks, and cloud computing, to name just a few. However, for many of these applications to fulfill their stated potential, the required system performance that wireless networks need to have cannot be achieved with current deployments. One of the major factors in the performance of wireless networks is the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. TheMAC layer serves as the junction between the Physical (PHY) and Network (NET) layers, and its efficiency is key to the performance of communication networks. This is especially critical for wireless networks, since wireless transmissions introduce interference into the system which can be detrimental to the performance of wireless networks. While the MAC layer consists of both software and hardware components, researchers overwhelmingly only perform computer simulations to verify the performance of their protocols, leaving the potential impact of hardware on the performance largely untested. Unlike the Physical (PHY) and Network (NET) layers, there is little experimental verification of the performance of novel protocols suggested for the MAC layer. Hence, protocols developed for the MAC layer do not get verified at a level commensurate with the claims of the protocols, thus generating no momentum to drive the adoption of new protocols. The end result is that the protocols in current use are little more than variants of the original ALOHA protocol proposed in 1970. So motivated, in this dissertation, I present a platform for implementation and experimentation of next-generation wireless MAC protocols, along with a novel architecture that uses a hardware-software decoupling principle to achieve flexibility without loss in performance and show how these platforms can aid prototyping of MAC protocols in the future. In addition to that, I will also present a MAC protocol for mmWave networks that can be implemented directly on the IEEE 802.11ad standards