  Wireless on-chip communication is a promising candidate to address the
performance and efficiency issues that arise when scaling current
Network-on-Chip (NoC) techniques to manycore processors. A Wireless
Network-on-Chip (WNoC) can serve global and broadcast traffic with ultra-low
latency even in thousand-core chips, thus acting as a natural complement of
conventional and throughput-oriented wireline NoCs. However, the development of
Medium Access Control (MAC) strategies needed to efficiently share the wireless
medium among the increasing number of cores remains as a considerable challenge
given the singularities of the environment and the novelty of the research
area. In this position paper, we present a context analysis describing the
physical constraints, performance objectives, and traffic characteristics of
the on-chip communication paradigm. We summarize the main differences with
respect to traditional wireless scenarios, to then discuss their implications
on the design of MAC protocols for manycore WNoCs, with the ultimate goal of
kickstarting this arguably unexplored research area.
