On performance measurements of TCP/IP and its device driver

A performance measurement of the processing overhead of TCP/IP on personal computers interconnected by Ethernet is given. In this measurement of the processing overhead comes from TCP and the Ethernet device driver. For TCP, a large portion of the overhead comes from the checksum computation. Almost all overhead of the lower layer comes from moving data from the main memory to the Ethernet card. Hence, if the bus speed can be increased and the TCP checksum can be performed by hardware, the processing overhead generated from TCP/IP and lower layers can be greatly reduced. The results presented shed light on designing communication protocols on personal computers.<
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