Hi Dmitry,

Le Tuesday 26 May 2009 13:21:57 Dmitry Eremin-Solenikov, vous avez écrit :

Hi,

As a part of research activities in the Embedded Systems - Open Platform
Group from Siemens Corporate Technology we are working on adding support
for the IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Personal Area Networks to the Linux. Our
current implementation is neither certified nor even feature complete.
However we'd like to present current state of our patchset to the Linux
developers community to gain comments, fixes, ideas, etc. This is not yet a
pull request, but more like an RFC.

Let met just thank you for doing this, I am glad some people worked on this. 
Got a couple of questions below.

The project page is available at
http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/linux-zigbee with source code of kernel
part available from git at
http://zigbee-linux.git.sourceforge.net, mirrored for convenience at
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/lumag/lowpan.git

The source code for userspace utils is available from git at
http://linux-zigbee.git.sourceforge.net/

From the project page I understand that you plan on providing a ZigBee stack, 
based on this 802.15.4 stack ? Do you plan on submitting the ZigBee stack 
later on ?

Maybe you should mention that this implementation is royalty-free, but that 
commercial products using it should both respect the GPL license and pay a 
ZigBee royalty as per the ZigBee Alliance . That is just for clarification 
since right now it simply does 802.15.4 which is not subject to this royalty 
thing.

Several comments about our implementation:
* As with 802.11 there are two types of devices: the smart ones that
implement most parts of the protocol by themselves and more or less dumb
ones which simply send and receive what they are told. Currently we do only
support the second type of devices (SoftMAC)
* The implementation is split between code driving radio, (master, mwpanX
  interface: mdev.c), code processing frames according the IEEE 802.15.4
  rules (slave wpanX devices) and finally sockets (af_ieee802154.c,
dgram.c, raw.c).

This sounds good. Do you also plan on integrating some meshing algorithm on 
top of 802.15.4 ? If so, 

* We do present two example drivers using our stack. One is purely virtual
  one either looping the packets back or connecting several virtual
interfaces (the one at fakelb.c), and the driver for the Freescale MC13192
evaluation boards (13192-SARD, 13192-EVK) using our custom firmware
(currently only available at request, we are working on publishing it). The
driver for the Atmel at86rf230/at86rf231 chips will follow in several
weeks.

Is the virtual interface just like mac80211_hwsim for 802.11 ?h
-- 
Best regards, Florian Fainelli
Email : florian@openwrt.org
http://openwrt.org
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