Link Aggregation for Embedded Applications

Abstract: Connectivity is a key feature for digital devices to exist in this connected world. Every device sends and receives the data. As the demand of data communication is increasing day by day has resulted in enhancements of capacity and QoS of interfaces and devices supporting more than one communication types. The subsequent evolution to enhance the data communication speed is to aggregate the multiple physical channels, aka Link Aggregation. Link aggregation is already in use for faster data syncs across servers using dedicated links and, IEEE has already come up with the standards for the same. With the rapid strides in the integration technology etc yet another trend that is emerging currently is the ever increasing capabilities and applications of embedded systems. Embedded Systems too now simultaneously support different types of communication interfaces!! It is envisaged that �Link Aggregation� would soon become a requirement for embedded systems, and this project work was taken up towards studying the possibilities. Raspberry Pi is an open and also regarded as a good reference platform for Embedded Systems development was chosen for the study in this project work. Ethernet and Wi-Fi are the most common and standard communication interfaces supported in almost every digital system, and, TCP, UDP and SCTP are the very commonly employed protocols for data communication. Therefore these interfaces and protocols have been selected for the study and comparison of performance of data communication between computer and embedded platform in this project work. Having collected the data and done some analysis, few recommendations for further enhancements and work were also made from this work.

Keywords: Link Aggregation, data rate, client server communication, point to point communication, Raspberry pi, protocols, performance.