A Novel Hardware-Software Codesign of Network Protocol Stacks on a SoC Platform

In this paper, we propose a novel hardware-software codesign technique of network protocol stacks on a SoC (system on chip) platform for providing the QoS (quality of service) functionality. We address that the codesign should guarantee the real-time performance of periodic packets and minimize the average response time of aperiodic packets in order to provide the QoS functionality. We present the following three mechanisms to resolve this issue: 1) task decomposition technique of a network protocol suite into hardware and software tasks, 2) a communication channel between heterogeneous tasks, 3) fine-grained and coarse-grained real-time processing simultaneously for application-specific real-time requirements. A case study based on experiments is conducted to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed technique by implementing it on the commercial SoC platform embedded with the Altera´s Excalibur EPXA4 including ARM922T core and 400K gates of programmable logic.