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Automated Development of Cooperative MAC Protocols

A Compiler-Assisted Approach

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Abstract

Letting users cooperate is a promising approach to improve reliability and throughput in wireless networks, but it has not yet made the transition into practice. Unlike conventional wireless communication, cooperation distributes each single transmission among multiple users and channels. Consequently, a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol developer has to cope with various new, heavily distributed protocol functions that are tedious to implement and to debug. To untie this complex development process, we propose to automate its most error-prone parts: Implementation of MAC automata, analysis, and code generation. To do so, we formalize cooperative MAC protocols by a new, easy-to-use specification language and propose a compiler for which we construct various backends to automatically analyze validity and performance of the specification and to translate the specified protocols into program code for simulators and even Software-Defined Radio (SDR) prototypes. All this provides a lightweight, heavily automated development process that quickly turns a cooperative MAC protocol specification into a practical implementation.

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Notes

  1. Throughout the paper we use the term user to refer to nodes in a network, whereas we use the term node to refer to nodes in trees.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments that improved the paper’s final version.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Networks Group, University of Paderborn, Warburger Str. 100, 33098, Paderborn, Germany

    Hermann Simon Lichte, Stefan Valentin & Holger Karl

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  1. Hermann Simon Lichte
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  2. Stefan Valentin
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  3. Holger Karl
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Correspondence to Hermann Simon Lichte.

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Lichte, H.S., Valentin, S. & Karl, H. Automated Development of Cooperative MAC Protocols. Mobile Netw Appl 15, 769–785 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-009-0210-5

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