SOMAC is a Self-Organizing MAC-sublayer system. SOMAC switches MAC protocols in order to improve the overall network's performance. The MAC protocol selection engine is based on the Q-Learning algorithm.

The project is fully implemented in Software-Defined Radios (SDR), including both the data link layer (i.e. MAC protocols and framing) and the physical (PHY) layer.

There are 2 MAC protocols available currently. They belong to the project gr-macprotocols, click in the link for more information.

SOMAC uses the PHY layer from the project IEEE 802.11 a/g/p Transceiver. More information is available in https://github.com/bastibl/gr-ieee802-11.

The upper layers can be either simulated by GNU Radio or connected to the upper layer of the Linux operating system via TUN/TAP interfaces. Examples are provided for the latter, allowing the use of well-known applications such as ping, ftp, ssh, etc. to generate network traffic.

There are two installation scripts available for SOMAC. The first is called install-pc.sh and relates to the installation over a physical machine or a virtual machine (both tested on Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04). On the other hand, the second is called install-container.sh is designated for installation over an Ubuntu docker container. In both cases, the script checks for all SOMAC dependencies and installs the missing ones. That includes the list below.

• GNU Radio;
• cmake;
• git;
• gr-ieee802-11 (plus swig, liblog4cpp5-dev, and log4cpp);
• gr-foo;
• gr-toolkit;
• gr-macprotocols;
• and gr-somac itself.

There are necessary steps to configure the TUN/TAP interface in order to connect the upper layers from the Linux operating system to the data link and PHY layers of SOMAC. The folder gr-somac/apps provides config scripts for that. The scripts config_interface_tuntap_GATEWAY.sh relates to the coordinator/master node, whereas config_interface_tuntap_<ID>.sh related to ordinary/slave nodes. The master node gets the following IP: 192.168.123.1 for the TUN/TAP interface. Others follow the increasing sequence of 192.168.123.2, 192.168.123.3, ..., 192.168.123.n, where n+1 is equal to <ID>.

Examples can be found at gr-somac/examples. Those scripts were tested using Software-Defined Radios USRP B2*0 from the FUTEBOL project, testbed UFMG. Some hyperparameters may need to be adjusted in order to run SOMAC on different devices.

Full name: André Vinícius Gomes Santos Gonçalves (usually André Gomes)
E-mail: andre.gomes@dcc.ufmg.br
Website: https://homepages.dcc.ufmg.br/~andre.gomes/