Performance of a firewire-Ethernet protocols conversion on an ARM7 embedded processor

Domestic needs for local area networks led to the emergence of a new protocol, the IEEE 1394: also called Firewire. This protocol provides real-time communications services. Usually, the very popular Ipv4 over IEEE 802.3 Ethernet does not support these services. Software approaches have been proposed to interconnect these types of networks. Their implementation generally rely on embedded processors. In this paper, the ARM7TDMI has been evaluated to characterize its performance for this application.