Terminology

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Whitefield decouples the physical layer from above layers.

Airline

Airline refers to the physical(+mac) layer. Airline implementation is handled by thirdparty simulators such as NS3.

Stackline

These are the real-world protocol stacks. 6lowpan/Network layer and above protocol stack provided by thirdparty IoT OSes such as Contiki/RIOT. A new platform is added in such OSes to interface with Whitefield. The protocol stack with application will be used as-is from these OSes.

Commline

Message queue and corresponding interfaces which decouples Airline and Stackline. All the messages be it the network payloads or OAM messages are transported using Commline.

NodeID

Whitefield assigns an internal nodeid to all the nodes. Note that this node id may not necessarily translate to the mac-address. The nodeid starts with 0 and reaches numOfNodes-1, where numOfNodes is part of the configuration. The wfshell commands refers to this NodeID when invoking a cmd_* command.