Custom Wireless AC Router

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zanegray

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Oct 3, 2011
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Hi!

I am interested in building my own wireless router. Reasons are for learning, flexiblity and performance.

My questions is: how much of the AC wireless spec might be implemented in router firmwares and not in the wireless drivers?

For example, if I were to get something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833320173
for a wireless adapter and use it with a linux distro of a sort, would I lose out on some of the newer aspects of wireless AC such as beamforming or multi-user MIMO or are these technologies implemented at the driver level?

Any general recommendations in regards to building a custom router are welcome of course!

Thanks!
 
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From the looking at it most the really good stuff is actually in the chipset itself. I don't think the drivers have much other than a call to the chip.

The easiest software to read the source to is the asus one. You can download it as one huge rar from their site. You could also download dd-wrt but it is not as simple to dig though the source files. So far I have not found any software that does a lot related to the radios themselves. It pretty much sends strings of data to the chip and it appears the chip does the rest. There are SO many files to dig though.

Both broadcom and atheros have pretty good datasheets on their chipset but you really need to be a hardware guy to understand a lot of it.
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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From the looking at it most the really good stuff is actually in the chipset itself. I don't think the drivers have much other than a call to the chip.

The easiest software to read the source to is the asus one. You can download it as one huge rar from their site. You could also download dd-wrt but it is not as simple to dig though the source files. So far I have not found any software that does a lot related to the radios themselves. It pretty much sends strings of data to the chip and it appears the chip does the rest. There are SO many files to dig though.

Both broadcom and atheros have pretty good datasheets on their chipset but you really need to be a hardware guy to understand a lot of it.
 
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zanegray

Distinguished
Oct 3, 2011
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18,520
Thank you bill001g. Your answer was helpful and I may try to read some of the source. I guess I would be curious to know how much of the openwrt firmware is providing a layer to interact with all the different tool stacks for setting up routing rules, ssid credentails, etc vs vs providing custom wireless drivers or whatnot.
 
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