International Journal of Network Management
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This paper explores radio link enhancement utilising dynamic run-time software download and configuration. In particular, the insertion of virtual medium access control (MAC), hybrid automatic repeat request (ARQ) and compression enhancement layers are considered in this paper. This is made possible with a flexible protocol stack framework, which permits the insertion of protocol layers and configuring them in a platform-independent manner. A general purpose central processing unit (CPU) environment is used in order to assess performance and power consumption of this proposed approach. The results presented indicate that there are scenarios in which this approach is attractive and that execution environment optimisations for performing generic protocol functions can increase the applicability to more scenarios.Currently protocols, and in particular link layer protocols, are designed to support specific traffic and underlying radio propagation characteristics and network topologies that are expected to be observed in a range of deployment scenarios in a manner that is determined at a system design time. As a result, this leads to many different solutions that are tailored to the particular and quite specific requirements such as short range personal area networks (PAN) based on bluetooth or ultra wide band (UWB), local area networks (LAN) based on 802.11 and of course many wide area cellular networks. These solutions cannot be changed to support traffic characteristics and radio performance observed in scenarios that were not envisaged at the time of standardisation. Hence, many new releases of standards are generated to incorporate these new and often optional features that often cannot be used because not all devices support these features. A flexible protocol stack framework has been proposed to provide the ability to insert and configure new software protocol implementations at run time. The overall benefit of this is that new optional features can be exploited before or without standardisation. In addition, dynamic optimisation can be performed to tailor the protocol configuration to specific scenarios and adapt to the changing radio environment. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.