Gigabit Ethernet Based Image Acquisition System for IR Camera

With the advancements in the hardware technology, it is now possible to transmit data over Ethernet at the rate of 100Mbps/1Gbps. The only limiting factor for such a high peed data transfer is the speed of the processor in the computer which does all the TCP/IP processing by using the TCP/IP software written in it. In the present system, the IR sensor used is taking 50 images of plasma per second. When these images data are converted into digital, 7.3 Mbytes of data is required to be transmitted over the Ethernet. To transfer such a huge amount of data over the Ethernet, a TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) is used. TOE has the TCP/IP protocols implemented in hardware and does the all the TCP/IP processing. Thus, the image data transfer at Gigabit speed is achieved.

I. Introduction

As the network connections scale beyond Gigabit Ethernet speeds, the CPU becomes burdened with the large amount of TCP/IP protocol processing. In high-speed networks, the CPU has to dedicate more processing time to handle the network traffic than to the applications it is running. The TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) is emerging as a solution to reduce the processing required by CPU for networking links. The TOE may be embedded in a network interface card, NIC, or Host Bus Adapter, HBA. The TOE has the TCP/IP protocols implemented in hardware. So, it can reduce the amount of TCP/IP processing handled by microprocessor and server I/0 subsystem, and thus ease server networking bottleneck. Deployment of TCP/IP offload in conjunction with high-speed Ethernet technologies enable applications to take full advantage of the networking capabilities.