MultiNet defines virtualization of a wireless card as an abstraction of multiple wireless networks as different always active virtual adapters over a single WLAN card. It should be possible for a user to change individual parameters of each virtual adapter, and these always active adapters should also be able to send and receive packets at any time. MultiNet achieves this by multiplexing the wireless card across multiple networks. It uses an adaptive network hopping scheme where a card gets a time slot, called the Activity Period, for each network operating on a particular channel. The sum of the activity periods over all the connected networks is called the Switching Cycle. We describe MultiNet within the context of the following four questions:
We limit the scope of this paper to the study of single-hop networks only, which may be infrastructure-based or ad hoc. Several additional interesting questions arise when considering MultiNet over multihop networks, but we do not consider these in this paper and leave them for future work.