Toward MAC Protocol Service over the air

With the rapid permeation of smartphones and wireless sensors in our society, smartphones are poised to become personal hubs connecting wireless sensors with users and the Internet. Due to frequent changes to applications and network conditions, wireless networks connecting a personal hub and wireless sensors must meet time-varying QoS requirements at minimal energy cost. This paper presents the architecture of a novel Protocol Service System (PSS) towards the vision of protocol service over the air. In contrast to traditional wireless networks where a single MAC protocol is statically selected a priori, PSS switches among multiple MAC protocols at run time to dynamically optimize power efficiency subject and meet current QoS requirements. To meet the memory constraint on wireless sensors PSS employs a component-based reconfigurable MAC architecture to support multiple MAC protocols at significantly reduced memory footprint through component sharing. The feasibility of PSS has been demonstrated through a proof-of-concept implementation of the PSS architecture and the development of a personal hub prototype running the Android OS.