/ CC BY / Victor Aznabaev
What is this project
Most of the firmware for Wi-Fi devices are proprietary, so you cannot check if they have any backdoors. Experts from the IDLab laboratory, formed on the basis of the Ghent and Antwerp universities in Belgium, decided to rectify the situation and launched the Openwifi project. This is an open source Wi-Fi FPGA implementation compatible with Linux. The engineers presented their developments at the FOSDEM 2020 conference dedicated to free software.
All code with hardware diagrams is on GitHub and is licensed under the AGPLv3 license . Although in this project several third-party modules were used - for example, commercial transceivers. Before you start working with Openwifi, you need to consider their licenses.
How does it work
The hardware of the system is based on a Xilinx FPGA and an AD9361 radio transmitter . It also used the SoftMAC architecture, which implements the 802.11 wireless stack on the driver side. The mac80211 subsystem provided by the Linux kernel is responsible for this task. The authors of the project placed the schema in their repository.
The software part is based on OpenOFDM - an open implementation of the OFDM decoder on Verilog. You can interact with the Wi-Fi module using the standard Linux utilities - ifconfig and iwconfig , as well as the specialized sdrctl program- it allows access to the Openwifi driver via netlink. The authors used the nl80211 and cfg80211 libraries to control wireless drivers from user space.
Among the main capabilities of the system, it is worth highlighting a 20 MHz bandwidth and a frequency range from 70 MHz to 6 GHz, time slicing by MAC address and implementation of the DCF protocol on the FPGA side, which is the basic access protocol in Wi-Fi networks.
What are its prospects
Openwifi is in the early stages of development, so there is no need to talk about high bandwidth. The authors achieved download speeds of 30.6 and 38.8 Mbps for TCP and UDP. The upload speed is slightly lower - 17.0 and 21.5 Mbit / s, respectively.
/ CC BY / Frank Wang
In the future, the developers plan to increase these indicators. The addition of 802.11ax Wi-Fi support is also on their roadmap . Overall, Hacker News residents say Openwifi is another major step towards fully open hardware for wireless networks. It remains to implement the corresponding radio frequency chip - the main thing is that there are no problems with patents of various corporations.
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