(Re-)Configuration options

TAISC offers a lot of configuration options in order to tweak settings of the physical layer and the MAC layer. This chapter will give an overview of which configuration options are open for developers, and how they can be tweaked.

Configuration options

Global variables:

Configuration option	Description
active radio config index	If there are multiple radio configurations available, pass the index of the one that needs to be activated
Radio configurations	List of pointers to radio configurations
macPANId	PAN identification (used for frame filter)
macShortAddress	2 byte node address (used for frame filter)
macExtendedAddress	8 byte node address (used for frame filter)
phyCurrentChannel	radio phyCurrentChannel
phyTXPower	2 byte node address (used for frame filter)
promiscous	Is frame filtering enabled?
autoAck	Auto acknowledge incoming frame (if ack request bit is set)
ccaMode	Set the CCA mode to: disabled, technology detection, threshold, hybrid
ccaHyst	CCA hysterisis value
ccaThres	CCA threshold value
radioBandwidth	Bandwidth of the wireless signal
radioSamplingRate	Sampling rate of the radio

How to perform (re)-configuration

The configuration of MAC- and physical layer can either be passed at compile time, or at runtime

At compile time

At compile time, TAISC loads a set of default parameters. These values can be altered freely, by altering them directly in:

• lower_mac/chains/globals.h : offers a set of parameters which are shared between all radio programs;
• lower_mac/chains/<MAC>-chain.c : offers a set of parameters which are specific for a certain MAC protocol.

At runtime

TAISC allows for parameters to be changed at runtime. In order to expose a parameter to the upper layers, a compile attribute should be added:

__attribute__((annotate(“configurable”)))

If this attribute is added, the parameter is automatically placed in the parameter repository of contiki. E.g.:

{
    { TAISC_IEEE802154_macPANId , WISHFUL_UINT16 , 2 },
    global_ctrl_getParameter,
    global_ctrl_setParameter}
}

The Contiki parameter repository knows the name, type and size of the parameter. Also a getter and setter function are passed, in order to control the parameter. By using these getters and setters, it becomes straightfoward to control the parameters without knowledge about the internals of TAISC.

static void* global_ctrl_getParameter(param_t* parameter){
    ...
}

error_t set_global_parameter(uint16_t parameter_id, void* new_value, uint16_t length){
    ...
}

All these exposed parameters are automatically made available to wishful (see wishful documentation).