Implementation of a hybrid TCP/IP offload engine prototype

Recently TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) technology, which processes TCP/IP on a network adapter instead of the host CPU, has become an important approach to reduce TCP/IP processing overhead in the host CPU. There have been two approaches to implementing TOE: software TOE, in which TCP/IP is processed by an embedded processor on a network adapter; and hardware TOE, in which all TCP/IP functions are implemented by hardware. This paper proposes a hybrid TOE that combines software and hardware functions in the TOE. In the hybrid TOE, functions that cannot have guaranteed performance on an embedded processor because of heavy load are implemented by hardware. Other functions that do not impose as much load are implemented by software on embedded processors. The hybrid TOE guarantees network performance near that of hardware TOE and it has the advantage of flexibility, because it is easy to add new functions or offload upper-level protocols of TCP/IP. In this paper, we developed a prototype board with an FPGA and an ARM processor to implement a hybrid TOE prototype. We implemented the hardware modules on the FPGA and the software modules on the ARM processor. We also developed a coprocessing mechanism between the hardware and software modules. Experimental results proved that the hybrid TOE prototype can greatly reduce the load on a host CPU and we analyzed the effects of the coprocessing mechanism. Finally, we analyzed important features that are required to implement a complete hybrid TOE and we predict its performance.