Study on enhanced strategies for TCP/IP offload engines

In this paper, we survey TCP/IP protocol processing mechanisms for high-speed networks and investigate typical of researches published in the literature to seek some enhanced strategies for improving TCP/IP offload engines (TOEs) embedded in high-speed networking mechanisms based on gigabit or ten-gigabit Ethernet. In our study, some overheads of protocol processing are pointed out, and a few important techniques for treating these overheads are described in detail. To achieve high throughput during heavy traffic load and low latency during light or medium traffic load for urgent data flow, we propose an enhancement for TOEs using the technique of adaptive interrupts coalescing with types of service (TOS) to allow of dynamically adjusting interrupt coalescing parameters. To verify our proposal, we realize an experimental platform running on Linux, networking with gigabit Ethernet. Several experiments are conceived to perform over the experimental platform for evaluating the performance of our scheme. From the results of the experiment, we see the usefulness of our scheme in improving the performance of TOEs.