Atheros ATH5K wireless driver

Abstract

Wireless is becoming the most popular type of communication nowadays. There are a variety of wireless devices in the market. The diversity of wireless devices leads to the incompatibility of wireless device drivers on different platforms. Fortunately, on open - source platform like Linux, this problem is solved and supported through open - source projects. In t his thesis, we are going to explore such an open - source project : ath 5k driver for WLAN card using Atheros chipsets. The focus is three - fold. Firstly, operations of WLAN MAC layer (I E E E 8 0 2 . 1 1 ), both in the infra structure mode and the infrastructure - less (ad - hoc ) mode, are described and analyzed. Secondly, the source code of at h5 k device driver is analyzed and discussed o n different characteristics. These ones include : i ) data structures to be used in the at h5k, i i ) reception and transmission packet flows , i i i ) configuration flow. Finally, realistic scenarios are presented to illustrate for the operations of at h5k device driver, and to collect statistical wireless information.