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Wi-Fi system design

Challenge:

Our customer is a prominent broadband wireless systems integrator, specialized in point to point and point to multipoint wireless systems solutions.

Our customer needed to develop a next generation software and hardware product, a point to multipoint fixed broadband wireless local loop platform. The customer contacted Softage among five other companies in three different countries to provide a competitive cooperation proposal for R&D and software development services. Softage Inc won this bid for the project and was eventually chosen because of its expertise, experience, value proposition and quick response.

Solution

The system designed by our team is a complete software solution satisfying customer’s requirements. The system consists if three basic building blocks:

Access Point (AP) units
Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) units
Network Management Software (NMS)

AP units are installed in a central location and provide coverage for an area as planned by the local operator and as permitted by sector antennas. CPE units are installed at the end-user location within coverage of a particular AP and provide the end user connection to the network. NMS software is adapted to the new software and hardware product.
        

The main specific requirement of this project is implementation of Medium Access Control layer scheduling and management techniques. MAC layer is being managed by user-defined Quality of Service values. This allows solving hidden node problem, to increase efficiency of long range and quality of bandwidth-critical communication.
The MAC layer supports up to 512 remote CPE units active simultaneously;
The MAC layer gives a mechanism to provide configurable, independent uplink and downlink bandwidth restrictions per CPE unit with a granularity of 32 kilobits per second in real time;
In other words, the system provides dynamic scheduling of MAC according to CPE priorities.

Network management package tools provide utilities for remote and local AP and CPE configuration.

Tools and technologies:

Tools: C/C++, Wi-Fi
Operating systems: Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD