One size hardly fits all: Towards context-specific wireless MAC protocol deployment

This paper casts recent accomplishments in the field of Wireless MAC programmability into the emerging Software Defined Networking perspective. We argue that an abstract (but formal) description of the MAC protocol logic in terms of extensible finite state machines appears a convenient and viable data-plane programming compromise for modeling and deploying realistic MAC protocol logics. Our approach is shown to comply with existing control frameworks, and entails the ability to dynamically change the MAC protocol operation based on context and scenario conditions; in essence, move from the traditional idea of "one-size-fits-all" MAC protocol stack to the innovative paradigm of opportunistically on-the-fly deployed context-specific MAC stacks. With the help of selected and currently developed use cases, we report on preliminary integration activities within the CREW federated wireless testbed, and its OMF experiment control framework. Copyright 2013 ACM