This effort brings together experimental PHY researchers from UCLA, networking research from UCI, and engineering expertise from Umachines to develop a highly flexible radio platform for the networking community. The availability of such a platform will spawn innovative and groundbreaking networking research for years to come. The main thrusts of this proposal are two fold: (1) Specification, design, and development of a versatile radio platform with a fully defined API and a user friendly GUI. Two classes of radio nodes will be developed. The first is an inexpensive platform built entirely on DSP processors. This platform can handle bandwidths of a few MHz and can accommodate one or two antennas. The second node leverages FPGA technology and will provide real time operation in 25 MHz of bandwidth and can support up to 4 antenna elements. (2) Networking research carried out by UCI culminating in the implementation of the resulting algorithms on the developed nodes. The work will investigate MAC enhancements for both SISO and MIMO enabled nodes such that the physical layer parameters are controlled through the MAC layer for higher overall performance (cross-layer design). In addition to providing research results of great interest to the community, this work will push the nodes to their limits of flexibility and drives the definition and implementation of the MAC/PHY interface.
