Proposal: 802.11 Communications with Embedded Systems

This project is an attempt to solve a problem that plagues any project using an embedded system ranging from cell-phones, to automated vacuum cleaners, or computerized home automation systems: Communication. Communication requires a protocol, or some established standard to allow data to travel through a medium be it air, copper, or fiber. Along with these standards problems arise in areas such as reliability, documentation, security, implementation, documentation, price, and community support. Each of those factors determine what communication protocol is best suited for the Embedded System. Viable communication protocols include RS-232, I2C (two wire interface), SPI (serial peripheral interface) and parallel communication yet, the only protocol that allows instant global communication is 802.3 coupled with TCP/IP.

IEEE 802.3, otherwise known as Ethernet, along with TCP/IP build the lower four layers of the OSI model and account for the majority of all implementations of the Internet. Since its inception, the 802.3 standard and the TCP/IP protocols have tackled each of the issues aforementioned before. Reliability has been solved through the transmission control protocol that uses acknowledgements and checksums to verify that data has been received accurately, and security has been taken care of by a number of protocols.

The goal of this project is to simply learn how to use a TCP/IP stack on an embedded system and allow it to communicate over the network and possibly build a program that will allow interaction with the embedded system over the Internet. Also we will develop our client/server programs at the end node using Perl with the Berkeley Internet Socket API.