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Design of Software and Hardware Modules for a TCP/IP Offload Engine with Separated Transmission and Reception Paths  

Jang Hank-Kok (부산대학교 컴퓨터공학과)
Chung Sang-Hwa (부산대학교 컴퓨터공학과)
Choi Young-In (부산대학교 컴퓨터공학과)
Publication Information
Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory / v.33, no.9, 2006 , pp. 691-698 More about this Journal
Abstract
TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) is a technology that processes TCP/IP on a network adapter instead of a host CPU to reduce protocol processing overhead from the host CPU. There have been some approaches to implementing TOE: software TOE based on an embedded processor; hardware TOE based on ASIC implementation; and hybrid TOE in which software and hardware functions are combined. In this paper, we designed software modules and hardware modules for a hybrid TOE on an FPGA that had two processor cores. Software modules are based on the embedded Linux. Hardware modules are for data transmission (TX) and reception (RX). One core controls the TX path and the other controls the RX path of the Linux. This TX/RX path separation mechanism can reduce task switching overheads between processes and overcome poor performance of single embedded processor. Hardware modules deal with creating headers for outgoing packets, processing headers of incoming packets, and fetching or storing data from or to the host memory by DMA. These can make it possible to improve the performance of data transmission and reception. We proved performance of the TOE with separated transmission and reception paths by performing experiments with a TOE network adapter that was equipped with the FPGA having processor cores.
Keywords
TCP/IP Offload Engine; FPGA; Processor Core; Embedded Linux; TX/RX Path Separation;
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