A 10 GbE TCP/IP hardware stack as part of a protocol acceleration platform

With the increasing number of Internet services, the flexible and reliable TCP/IP protocol suite has become a standard for network communication. TCP/IP is the underlying protocol used for ordered, connection-oriented data transfers over the Internet. Also in the application field of embedded systems TCP/IP has become the protocol suite of choice, because of interoperability across the internet. The next generation of embedded communication solutions will address 10 Gbps and more due to the growing demand for low round-trip times and high throughput. This paper presents a fully hardwired 10 GbE TCP/IP stack, designed a tightly coupled system integrating higher-level protocols and application-specific logic in order to build a fully integrated and accelerated communication stack as part of an FPGA or ASIC design. The advantages of using a hardware-based 10 GbE TCP/IP stack in terms of latency and throughput are illustrated in this paper by comparing its performance with that of state-of-the-art network interface cards in conjunction with software-based TCP/IP stacks.