1. Drivers & Firmware

For fifteen years we have written firmware and driver software, including Board Support Packages, that go into chipsets residing in routers and edge devices, handsets, phones, cars, computers, cameras and other electronics.

Our specialized Embedded Systems group has thorough knowledge of Wi-Fi Standards 802.11a/b/g/n/i/ac/u including Wireless Security protocols and significant experience of building solutions for Home Networks, Media, Energy and Automotive Infotainment, across a range of Application Processors and SOCs. We are engaged in building and enhancing Wireless and Bluetooth Drivers for some of world’s most popular platforms. We have worked on processors connected as external or internal peripherals as well as on integrated multiprocessor systems such as hardware accelerators, network processors to achieve optimized networking performance.

Our specialities include

Network

• Ethernet 10/100/ GigE
• WiFi –802.11 a/b/g /n/ac
• Station Mode Drivers
• AP Mode Drivers
• Bluetooth and BLE
• Zigbee
• PPP/ PPPoE
• ADSL
• GPRS Module Driver

Audio/Video/GFX

• Framebuffer
• DirectFB
• V4L2( Capture TV/Tuner)
• ALSA ( Audio)

Bus Controllers and Drivers

• PCI/ MiniPCI
• PCMCIA
• Cardbus
• UHCI/OHCI/EHCI/USB Host Controller

USB Function Drivers

• USB OTG

Serial

• UART
• I2C
• SPI

USB Functions

• Serial
• Storage
• WiFi
• HID
• Camera
• RNDIS

File Systems

• FAT
• HFSPlus
• YAFFS

And various other applications

• MTD
• GPIO/LED based control
• DMA
• SMP
• Softirqs
• BHs
• Workqueue
• Timers and Synchronization constructs

Our device driver expertise falls in many categories including Network Drivers, Bus Controllers & Drivers, Audio/Video, USB Function Drivers and File Systems to name a few. To find out more please request a white paper from info@alumnux.com.

2. Home Router

Alumnus has successfully completed building the software for an OpenWRT-based Wireless Router. Part of the software was built utilizing vendor specific SDK. The new features built entirely from scratch notably include:

• Customized the build system for control of the build process, code maintenance and patch management.
• Built a feature to detect the Network link state and aid recovery under network failure conditions.
• Added support for in-kernel IPv6 and PPPoE pass-through.
• Made easy the router configuration management through better router default settings, user settings and backup configuration.
• Enhanced the router security by implementing a robust prevention of Denial of Service attack.
• Implemented a lightweight LED daemon, to address concurrent controlling of all LED devices for a variety of events all with different priorities and patterns.

3. Networking Lab Automation

• Alumnus designed and developed a test automation framework to automate a complete Network test lab setup, test case execution and result collection involving thousands of test scenarios.
• The customers required that their devices (broadband modems and routers) be verified in functional conformance, performance and endurance areas.
• This required a huge number of test cases to be executed involving bridge scenarios (Wi-Fi, LAN), routed scenario (xDSL WAN, Ethernet WAN scenarios), tunnelling (6RD, DSLITE, IPSEC, L2TP) cases.
• Support was included in the framework to generate each of the test case definitions from the test plan.
• The automation framework was required to support multiple traffic generation tool (example IxChariot, Spirent Test Center, iPerf).

4. SAMBA throughput enhancement

This describes a series of exploratory activities seeking to enhance the customer’s end product (a reference design) by discovery of newer optimization techniques on SAMBA throughput.

• Analysed the existing data transfer (RX) paths in Kernel TCP/IP stack.
• Introduced data transfer method (RX) to reduce memory copy overhead in network stack.
• Analysed and modified generic file system mechanism in Linux Kernel.
• Distributed the Samba operation in different CPU's to enhance load balancing.
• Achieved 30% more throughput for FTP and 10% more throughput for Samba.

5. C2C protocol Stack

• Proof-of-concept Car-2-Car protocol on demonstration hardware to carry out Wi-Fi communication between two 802.11p modules.
• Development of an SDIO-Ethernet adapter to transfer data between the car’s subsystem and the reference board.
• Development of both the Ethernet driver and the SDIO driver for the product.
• The major design challenge was a speed incompatibility resulting in packet loss between Ethernet (100Mbps) and the 802.11p module (27Mbps).

To handle the same, Alumnus implemented a Flow Control logic optimized for speed and memory consumption. This minimized the loss of packets coming from the Ethernet end.

6. Portable Data Path Framework for network peripherals in any Router Platforms

Implementing a Linux based portable Data path framework for network peripherals (internal or external) which adapts to multiple platform requirements. The task required:

• Analysing all available platform specific requirements.
• Analysing all available peripheral specific requirements for all available platforms.
• Preparing a generic API and Hardware Abstraction API Layer.
• Preparing a Peripheral Function specific plugin layer to handle Peripheral specific requirements on a platform.
• Developing a single codebase to meet the peripherals / platforms requirements.
• The solution is compatible with any network type (WiFi, DSL etc.)
• This solution built is compatible with any traffic acceleration engine.