Design and Implementation of TCP/IP Offload Engine System over Gigabit Ethernet

Abstract

With the increasing network speed over Ethernet, the servers and communication systems has become burdened with the large amount of TCP/IP processing required. The main reason for the CPU bottleneck is the TCP/IP stack being processing at a rate less than network speed. In recent years, TCP/IP offload engine (TOE) is emerging as an attractive solution, which can reduce the host CPU overhead and improve network performance at the same time. The objective of this paper is therefore to design and implement a TOE offload system which attempts to offload the processing of TCP/IP protocols onto our designed host bus adapter. We have also implemented our TOE acceleration hardware block and associated TCP firmware to accomplish this goal. The experimental results show that our offload system can provide better TCP/IP transmission rate up to 296 Mbps as receiver and 239 Mbps as sender compared with embedded OS based solutions.