Fluid wireless protocols: energy-efficient design and implementation

Abstract

We stand at the dawn of the next wireless revolution that is driven by 5G and internet-of-things technologies. The dramatic increase in the diversity of needs necessitates breaking the walls of rigid protocols. This paper introduces the concept of fluid wireless protocols, i.e., protocols that can change with the application requirements. We also present a protocol development kit to aid the design of these fluid protocols. Our tool set consists of a protocol recommendation engine for wireless communications and a hardware optimization framework for optimizing the implementation on a state-of-the-art system-on-chip platform. Specifically, we propose a hardware recommendation engine to generate an energy-efficient hardware implementation. We demonstrate the proposed techniques on four protocols with varying requirements, and also run air-to-air experiments on a commercial system-on-chip platform.