The Design And Implementation Of Packet Transmitter Based On IXP2400

Along with the development of the network technology and the micro-electronics technology, the traditional processors are not competent for the need of growing network applications and services. Network processor is designed for the network application especially. So, deep research and efficient use of the network processor are necessary to satisfy the network applications.Using the parallel microprocessors, hardware multithread and portable software framework, a network packet transmitter system is designed and implemented. The transmitter system can be used to test the performance of capability of the software and hardware of the network applications. The design of the transmitter can be divided into two parts: the design of the data path and the design of control path.Applications designed for data path run on the microengines. Microengine assembly is used to improve the efficiency of the microengine. Software applications are used to control the hardware level parallel processing.Applications for control path are the software running on the XScale side. The hardware related BSP and user control API are implemented, including Strap module, Boot Program module, memory management module, system initialization module and control module. These modules are used to manage the whole system.At last, the code of the microengine is executed in Workbench simulator, using two host computers with different hardware platform. The packet transmitter system can send packets at the speed of 2.5Gbps, the execution load of the threads in mircoengine is from 6.20% to 9.98%, and the average execution load is 7%. This percentage indicates that the transmission module and the threads arbitration mechanism work well.