Subject: [manet] A question on wireless card parameter adjustment

From: "Yun Zhou" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 12:08:43 -0500

Dear colleagues,

I like to do some tests on 802.11-based wireless cards. I think maybe it is necessary to adjust some parameters, such as PIFS, DIFS, contention window... I do not know whether the current comercial wireless card products have such funtion for users. If not, is there any method to dig into the wireless card hardware to modify those parameters? I will very appreciate if you could give me some information about the problem.
Thanks in advance, and have a good day.

Peter
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From: David Young <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2006 12:22:09 -0600

On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 12:08:43PM -0500, Yun Zhou wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
> 
> I like to do some tests on 802.11-based wireless cards. I think maybe it
> is necessary to adjust some parameters, such as PIFS, DIFS, contention
> window... I do not know whether the current comercial wireless card
> products have such funtion for users. If not, is there any method to
> dig into the wireless card hardware to modify those parameters? I will
> very appreciate if you could give me some information about the problem.

You can set some of those parameters on some WLAN chips, especially the
so-called "dumb packet engines" that don't place a microcontroller &
thick firmware between the host and the MAC/PHY.  You will have to
dig into the sources.  Take a look at the drivers for Atheros, Ralink,
and Realtek adapters in Linux and in *BSD.  If you "grep" the sources
for the parameters that interest you, especially trying keywords EIFS,
DIFS, PIFS, SIFS, contention, window, CW, etc.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
[email-masked]      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933