[Tinyos-devel] Unified radio HIL

[Philip Levis]

On Jun 25, 2009, at 2:49 AM, Laurynas Riliskis wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have been using using TinyOS 2.x quite heavily for the past 6 month.
> There is a lot of excellent thing, and pretty solutions. However there
> is things that can be improved, and are the design choice is not clear
> for me.
> Most eye-catching, for me, is the absence of unified HIL/HAL for radio
> chips. There are four radio chip implementations each of them
> implementing custom packet, IEEE 802.15.4, link and so on.
> Therefore, for example, implementing unified MAC is not possible
> without getting hands-on physical layer.
> Almost all of these radio chips are PHY IEEE 802.15.4 compatible.
> Therefore it would be nice to have the unified PHY HIL. For the chips
> that have extra futures it would be possible to provide additional
> interface and the futures would not be waisted.
> Is there any plans for the unified radio HIL?

Well, they all support 802.15.4, but they have different levels of  
hardware support. E.g., whether there is hardware support for  
encryption. Also, the RX/TX buffering is different: while the CC2420  
has separate RX and TX FIFO memories, if I recall correctly, receiving  
a packet with the RF230 will clear the TX buffer.

You can of course hide these details in an HIL, but understandably  
such abstraction comes with a cost.

Phil