Adding Wi-Fi to the emulator

With the introduction of Wi-Fi architecture in Android, we can now extend the emulator to support Wi-Fi. To add Wi-Fi in the emulator, we need to build wpa_supplicant for the emulator and choose the right device driver for the eth1 network interface.

Enabling wpa_supplicant in BoardConfig.mk

In the default emulator build, wpa_supplicant is not built. To enable building wpa_supplicant for the emulator, we can add the following lines in our BoardConfig.mk:

BOARD_WPA_SUPPLICANT_DRIVER := WIRED 
WPA_SUPPLICANT_VERSION      := VER_0_8_X VER_2_1_DEVEL 
BOARD_WLAN_DEVICE           := eth1 

When BOARD_WPA_SUPPLICANT_DRIVER is defined, the following configuration in external/wpa_supplicant_8/wpa_supplicant/Android.mk will be changed to true:

ifneq ($(BOARD_WPA_SUPPLICANT_DRIVER),) 
  CONFIG_DRIVER_$(BOARD_WPA_SUPPLICANT_DRIVER) := y 
endif 

The value of BOARD_WPA_SUPPLICANT_DRIVER tells which driver should be built. Since we use a wired Ethernet connection to simulate Wi-Fi...