Openwifi is a Linux mac80211 compatible full-stack IEEE802.11/Wi-Fi design based on SDR (Software Defined Radio).
Created as part of the Orchestration and Reconfiguration Control Architecture (ORCA) project — an effort to provide experimentation facilities and testbed environments for wireless innovation — and funded through the European Union's Horizon2020 program, openwifi aims to provide a drop-in replacement for proprietary Wi-Fi devices on Linux using software defined radio in place of fixed-function radio systems.
The Linux mac80211 subsystem, as a part of Linux wireless, defines a set of APIs (ieee80211_ops) to rule the Wi-Fi chip driver behavior. The SoftMAC Wi-Fi chip driver implements (part of) APIs and that is why Linux can support so many types of Wi-Fi chips.
As well as providing access through the mac80211 APIs, userspace control of openwifi is provided using an sdrctrl system written as part of the project. Other project aspects include code which runs on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) as part of the software defined radio itself, and an SDR driver which sits below mac80211 to interface with the SDR.
Interested parties can download the source, which is provided under a dual-licence system, with the code provided to all under AGPLv3 and under a custom non-open licence on request for ease of implementation into commercial products, from the openwifi GitHub repository.
Openwifi is a unique customizable innovation platform. It has been leveraged by IDLab to design wireless time-sensitive extensions that are compatible with the Ethernet TSN specification. These extensions include, amonst others, hardware timestamping, queue gating, time-triggered operation, PTP integration, over-the-air scheduling, impactless association and mobility support, etc. With this, we are able to achieve microsecond synchronization accuracy, guaranteed milliseconds latencies and deterministic mobility. We outperform commercial-of-the-shelf Wi-Fi chips when it pertains to determinism, level of control and customization.
