Turbocell/WORP status

[Jouni Malinen]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 01:43:29PM +0200, Maxent s.r.o. wrote:

> I've searched mailing list and found latest question about Turbocell a 
> half year old with answer of non probability of implementing due to hw 
> problems. But because Turbocell/WORP and similar technologies can have 
> quite big impact on wireless network performance, I'm asking again: Is 
> there any developement in this area, or are there any recomendations, 
> especially on buying hw for hostap which could have the possibility of 
> supporting of these technologies in some future release (again big maybe) ?

Well, one thing about Turbocell/WORP is that at least I'm not very fond
of such proprietary solutions.. I just took a quick look at a WORP
technology overview and can't believe that someone is still claiming
something like "the protocol is not publicized or standardized, which
makes it less vulnerable for hackers ..."

Anyway, something similar to these (i.e., yet another proprietary
solution) could probably be implemented on top of any Prism2 driver. One
could either use IEEE 802.11 ACKs and re-transmits by selecting Host AP
mode or alternatively, try using pseudo-adhoc mode without ACKs and do
all the needed retransmits in the driver. Polling would also be
implemented on top of IEEE 802.11 with special data frames (etc.). In
addition, the driver could combine short packets into one IEEE 802.11
frame to improve performance.

This does not seem to be horribly complex, but would probably require
quite a bit of work to get it working with optimal performance. Simpler
proof-of-concept type of polling system should be doable relatively
quickly.

Apart from the technical issues, the remaining main issue is to get
someone interested in implementing this.. Getting an open source
alternative for such a protocol might be useful; especially, if the
design would be well documented and interoperable with devices from
different IEEE 802.11 vendors.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA