2 research outputs found
ReactiFi: Reactive Programming of Wi-Fi Firmware on Mobile Devices
Network programmability will be required to handle future increased network
traffic and constantly changing application needs. However, there is currently
no way of using a high-level, easy to use programming language to program Wi-Fi
firmware. This impedes rapid prototyping and deployment of novel network
services/applications and hinders continuous performance optimization in Wi-Fi
networks, since expert knowledge is required for both the used hardware
platforms and the Wi-Fi domain. In this paper, we present ReactiFi, a
high-level reactive programming language to program Wi-Fi chips on mobile
consumer devices. ReactiFi enables programmers to implement extensions of PHY,
MAC, and IP layer mechanisms without requiring expert knowledge of Wi-Fi chips,
allowing for novel applications and network protocols. ReactiFi programs are
executed directly on the Wi-Fi chip, improving performance and power
consumption compared to execution on the main CPU. ReactiFi is conceptually
similar to functional reactive languages, but is dedicated to the
domain-specific needs of Wi-Fi firmware. First, it handles low-level
platform-specific details without interfering with the core functionality of
Wi-Fi chips. Second, it supports static reasoning about memory usage of
applications, which is important for typically memory-constrained Wi-Fi chips.
Third, it limits dynamic changes of dependencies between computations to
dynamic branching, in order to enable static reasoning about the order of
computations. We evaluate ReactiFi empirically in two real-world case studies.
Our results show that throughput, latency, and power consumption are
significantly improved when executing applications on the Wi-Fi chip rather
than in the operating system kernel or in user space. Moreover, we show that
the high-level programming abstractions of ReactiFi have no performance
overhead compared to manually written C code