TAISC: A cross-platform MAC protocol compiler and execution engine

Abstract

MAC protocols significantly impact wireless performance metrics such as throughput, energy consumption and reliability. Although the choice of the optimal MAC protocol depends on time-varying criteria such as the current application requirements and the current environmental conditions, MAC protocols cannot be upgraded after deployment since their implementations are typically written in low level, hardware specific code which is hard to reuse on other hardware platforms. To remedy this shortcoming, this paper introduces TAISC, Time Annotated Instruction Set Computer, a framework for hardware independent MAC protocol development and management. The solution presented in this paper allows describing MAC protocols in a platform independent language, followed by a straightforward compilation step, yielding dedicated binary code, optimized for specific radio chips. The compiled code is as efficient in terms of memory footprint as custom-written protocols for specific devices. To enable time-critical operation, the TAISC compiler adds exact time annotations to every instruction of the optimized binary code. As a result, the TAISC approach can be used for energy-efficient cross-platform MAC protocol design, while achieving up to 97% of the theoretical throughput at an overhead of only 20 µs per instruction.