Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice in the Design of Wireless Communication Protocols and Applications

In wireless networks, bringing together theory and practice, i.e., going all the way from designing a protocol or application, evaluating it analytically and through simulations to having a working implementation, is far from trivial. This is due especially to the challenges raised by the spatially and time variant nature of the wireless channel. As a consequence, wireless protocol research typically stops at the simulation level when testing and evaluating solutions to the many problems raised by wireless networks. In this paper, we introduce Prawn (Prototyping Architecture for Wireless Networks), an environment for rapid prototyping of wireless network protocols. Prawn has been designed to provide: (i) a set of simple building blocks that implement common functions needed by a wide range of wireless protocols (e.g., neighbor discovery, link quality assessment, message transmission and reception), and (ii) a standard API that allows protocol designers easy access to the Prawn primitives. Prawn proves to be a simple, yet powerful, tool to design wireless network protocols, as we showcase through a number of examples. Prawn’s performance is thoroughly evaluated, stand-alone as well as in the context of the various case studies.