Design and development of native TCP/IP protocol stack for tiny embedded 8-bit microcontroller based application

Abstract

A simplified and customizable TCP/IP protocol stack of IPv4 (Internet Protocol Version 4) is developed in software implementation to target for the use by low processing power 8-bit microcontrollers with limited system resources of data and program memories that allow to be used. To this end, a hardware circuit board is built together to test the stack in an open environment through a few demonstration applications of a Web page server, a streaming audio and video server and other testing programs. To evaluate the performance, benchmark test will be performed by a set of test cases. As a result, it is found that adoption of a low processing power 8-bit microcontroller even in a few decades ago can perform the complicated TCP/IP tasks with acceptable performance under specific condition.