[Discuss-gnuradio] Using Python to communicate a GNU Radio process with a Click Modular Router process

[Juan Ramon Gutierrez Agullo]

Hi everyone

I'm a student from the University Miguel Hernandez (www.umh.es). I'm
trying to understand how to communicate a GNU Radio process (802.11a PHY
transmitter) with a Click Modular Router process (802.11a MAC-state
machine). I've been reading for a while the mailing list, and some
papers related with this issue, but I still have some unsolved
questions.

I explain: Click modular router process has to read/write packets
from/to a TCP UNIX socket. The GNU Radio process should read this
packets, move the packet through a flow graph (modulation OFDM,...) and
transmit it to the air.

The Click work side is done (communicates with a TCP socket) but I
haven't started the GNU Radio side yet.

As Eric Blossom says in this post
( http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnuradio/2007-08/msg00265.html ) a 
good way to do this is using Unix domain sockets to glue both processes. 
Therefore, I've had the next idea: to communicate two different processes using 
a socket handler in Python(only in the GNU Radio side) in the next way:

        1st: create a block [socket_handler.py] - which reads/writes
        socket data and converts this data into "GNU Radio messages"

        2nd: Prepend the previous block to the PHY flow-graph (as the
        first element of my PHY block) and adapt the messages received
        from [socket_handler] as a payload for the following PHY blocks.

I've read another posts, but before start programming I'd like to have a
clear idea of what I want to do and whether it is correct or I'm missing
something. Any other proposal to do this will be welcomed.

Thanks

PS: The 802.11a transmitter version I'm using comes from the FTW project
on CGRAN and Click projects comes from Hydra project.