WARP2Android: A Flow-based Framework for increased Physical Layer Control

Secure Mobile Networking Lab - SEEMOO
Matthias Schulz and Denny Stohr, TU Darmstadt


The wireless research community is currently split into two groups. The first group focuses on physical layer research and testbed evaluation using software-defined radios (SDRs). The second group concentrates on upper layer research and takes off-the-shelf physical layer implementations for granted. With our novel WARP2Android framework we connect the Wireless Open-Access Research Platform (WARP) to Android smartphones. This allows to develop applications to modify physical layer settings based on application requirements. To abstract from implementation details on the physical layer, we introduce a flow-based intermediary layer that translates application requirements to explicit settings on the physical layer. Flows are used to reduce the management overhead by setting requirements on a per flow rather than a per frame basis. Our framework proved already beneficial in the context of video streaming applications.