An E cient End - Host Protocol Processing Architecture for Real - TimeAudio and Video Tra cKhawar

Information appliances (IAs) are mass-produced, low-cost devices for specialized computation/communi-cation tasks. Examples include webTV, smart cellular phones, and web phones. Since low cost and low power-consumption are important requirements in the design of these devices, IAs use relatively slow/cheap CPUs (usually 20{40 MHz). Real-time audio and video communication over the Internet is an integral part of many IAs which means that despite slow hardware , the communication subsystem within the OS must be able to eeciently handle heavy network traf-c. This paper presents a protocol architecture which reduces I-cache miss overheads (beneeting short audio messages) and also enables use of single-copy without any hardware support or restrictions on network APIs (beneeting long video messages). We implemented UDP/IP to evaluate our architecture and measurements show that overheads for short messages are reduced about 20% while overheads for long messages are reduced 15{22%.