Unifying Address and Name Based Communication in Wireless Medium Access Control

Abstract

Edge nodes deployed in edge environments (e.g., IoT) have two common use cases: i) access control and ii) disseminating data. An address based paradigm is suitable for sending access control commands to specific nodes, yet a name based one excels at filtering and disseminating data based on content regardless of who has the data. Current address based communication mandates grouping among nodes (e.g., using BSSID), incurring high overheads (e.g., periodic beacons); whereas name based discovery is much more efficient and flexible. However, the name based paradigm needs many assets possessed in the address based paradigm (e.g., frame rate adaptation). Such complementary strengths and needs call for unification of both paradigms to meet current edge environment needs. In this paper, we introduce a unified medium access control design that combines both paradigms. Our unified design eliminates the need for grouping in address based communication by a name based discovery protocol, enabling filtering based on address or data attributes. It leverages address based unicast rate adaptation to benefit name based communication through Our experiments show the system's ability to discover neighbor addresses based on application attributes, and filter thousands of both name and address based entries efficiently. It reduces latency of name based communication by 30X, and loss rate from 10-20% to 0% through address based rate adaptation algorithm with reliability.