Intermodule data sharing for flexible wireless MAC

Many effective approaches are proposed for adapting the wireless devices´ operation to specific contexts and services, but only a few of them can be really implemented in the actual wireless interfaces. The road to accommodate necessary and advocated improvement of wireless technologies goes through the rethinking of the current protocol stacks, pushing the programmability of the system towards the physical interface. New architectures proposed for wireless interfaces provide great flexibility obtained through the rationalization and modularization of existing solutions. However the effective exploitation of this flexibility is closely related with the implementation of a suitable infrastructure able to support the dynamic composition of elementary functions. In this paper we present an information management framework that greatly simplifies the data sharing among the components of a wireless stack designed according to a modular and flexible architecture. The designed information management framework enforces a data model that accounts for synchronous and asynchronous interactions, protection of values and includes a consistent memory management approach. A prototype implementation has been integrated in the wireless stack of the Linux kernel, as an extension of the mac80211 framework.