High rate packets transmission on Ethernet LAN using commodity hardware

Scope of this paper is to report on the measurements performed to test the reliability of high rate data transmission over copper gigabit Ethernet, by using commodity hardware, for the LHCb online system. The reliability of the system is crucial for the functioning of the software trigger layers of the LHCb experiment. The technological challenge in the system implementation consists of handling the expected high data throughput of event fragments using, to large extent, commodity equipment