An Approach to Dynamic Reconfigurable Transport Protocol Controller Unit Development

Abstract

Transport Protocol Controllers are parts of most terminal nodes of local networks widely used in information and telecommunication systems. Typically, a terminal node (node of local network) is exploited for several years. New applications, new versions of transport protocols or new transport protocols could be developed during this time. Support of these new features without change of equipment is very important today. Also set of tasks could be dynamically changed that leads changes in data flows. These changes in turn leads the changes of used transport layer protocols or their profiles. The Transport Protocol Controller unit should be dynamically reconfigurable to meet these requirements. Today dynamically reconfigurable components usually are developed with Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). However, power consumption, area, time characteristics (e.g. achievable clock frequency) of FPGA implementations are essentially worse than same parameters of Application Specific Integration Circuits (ASIC) implementations. These factors essentially constrain the application area of FPGA based dynamically reconfigurable systems. In this paper, we consider existing approaches for development of dynamically reconfigurable systems with ASIC, evaluate its applicability for Transport Protocol Controller Unit. We propose an approach to development of dynamically reconfigurable Transport Protocol Controller Unit. This approach allows us to take into account the specific requirements for this unit. In the paper we present several examples of the proposed approach. We have evaluated reachable parameters and overheads for these examples.

Keywords

• dynamic reconfiguration
• transport protocol
• information and telecommunication systems
• embedded systems