Virtual WiFi on Linux?

[Dan Searle]

Hi,

Talking somewhat specifically about Madwifi here, but what I'm saying
could be taken in a more generic sense....

Surely to run virtual AP's you need the NIC's to possess more than one
MAC address, i.e. for 16 Virtual AP's, you need 16 MAC addresses.
Then, run 16 separate MAC layers with some kind of modification to the
HAL to share (schedule) the PHY layer between the 16 MAC layers.

I.e. run 16 802.11 protocol stacks on top of a modified HAL which
contains some kind of intelligent PHY scheduler, to make sure we're
fair about how much time each MAC layer gets on the PHY.

Received frames are not under our control, so all the scheduler would
have to do is share out the PHY transmit buffer (e.g. SFQ?).

I think this would require either modifying any existing lower MAC
(HAL), or perhaps writing a completely new lower MAC (HAL).

Regards, Dan...

Thursday, October 20, 2005, 8:48:39 AM, you wrote:

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> Lancom is using something like that with atheros cards (L54A/AG).
> You can configure up to 8 SSIDs with different security (WEP, WPA1,
> WPA2, etc). Every SSID has a different MAC (they increment the first MAC
> Byte). While using this feature i saw that the throuput went down with
> more then one SSID. I think its a matter of fragmentation on wireless layer.

> Regards

> Math
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Dan Searle
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