A packet radio API

Abstract

A variety of organizations participating in DARPA's Global Mobile Information Systems (GloMo) research program are currently designing and testing advanced wireless modem hardware, simulation components, and software protocols for distributed packet radio networks. Such efforts promise to support the efficient, reliable, and secure communication of multimedia traffic over rapidly deployed, multihop, wireless networks that serve as seamless extensions of the Internet. In order for the participants to share research results and foster collaboration, we developed an interface specification to permit a mix-and-match approach that will enable the various network control protocols to be run on both the simulation and hardware systems currently being developed. The motivation for defining such an interface is to provide the flexibility to control various parameters such as power and data rate for future adaptive modems. This common radio application programmer's interface (API) is intended to be language-, operating-system-, and platform-independent; extensible for supporting new or unique radio features; and available for adoption by the wider community. We recognize the underlying capabilities of typical digital radios. Next, we categorize these capabilities into command, status, and measurement variables, and asynchronous events. We then show how these features are specified in the API, with specific examples of implementation in the "C" programming language.