Hardware Acceleration of FreeRTOS Network Stack for IoT Edge Devices

Abstract

Number of network-connected small devices is becoming significant and they implement a communication protocol stack for this connectivity. These devices are usually expected to operate a couple of years without any intervention and this makes power consumption a critical issue for them. Power consumption of these devices can be reduced by improving the system performance through accelerating specific functions by hardware. System on Chip (SoC) FPGAs are widely used for hardware acceleration on Internet of Things (IoT) environment. A network stack accelerator is proposed in this study and implemented on a Microsemi SoC FPGA. Experimental results show that in best case 80% of the time consumed for encapsulation can be saved.