As there are limited commercial products available which can perform true ad hoc multihop networking, there is a need for Piconet II. The Piconet II system will be able to form an ad hoc network on existing hardware and software platforms. The specification for the Piconet II system is to implement the DSR protocol for IPv42 on the Linux operating system. The system will run on x86 based PCs and on ARM3 based Compaq iPAQs using IEEE 802.11b wireless network interfaces. The reason the Linux operating system was chosen was because it was available across many different hardware platforms and the source code is publicly available. Being implemented for IPv4 means that the protocol will be transparent to all applications so existing applications would work without any modifications.
The protocol will be divided into two parts, a packet forwarding part and a routing part. The packet forwarding module will be running in the operating system kernel space and the routing program will be running in user space. The packet forwarding module will have a route table which it looks up in order to forward packets. The routing process will communicate with the packet forwarding module and also update the routing table as routes are being discovered and maintained.