[Discuss-gnuradio] beginner questions - implementing MAC

[Shravan Rayanchu]

Hi all,

I am new to gnuradio and I was wondering if you could help me out with
some of the questions I have:

I have a very little background of DSP/Comm. and I would to be able to
experiment/build 802.11 like MAC atop of gnuradio primitives.  Is
gnuradio right now at a stage where I can start doing this? How much
of a DSP background do I need? What are the problems I can expect? For
eg. I saw some throughput numbers in the range of 50kbps - is this
because of the lack of good modulation schemes which are not yet
implemented?

I came across some postings which talked about timing considerations
when implementing 802.11 like mac. Is this a  serious hurdle in the
development process (for building a MAC)?

BBN has code (for NetBSD) which implements 802.11 receive -- is this a
separate branch or  is it going to be merged with gnuradio release?

Can you tell me what could be the starting points in the code I should
be looking at? (digital/ tunnel.py , benchmark_rx/tx.py seem have some
implementation of csma).

Finally, without the USRP boards, is there anything I
test/run/simulate until then to get a general understanding of the
flow? (I have gnuradio installed ..)

Thanks for the help,

Shravan.