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Cost-effective Ethernet Communication for Low Cost Microcontroller Architecture

2012; Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science (IAES); Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

2088-8708

Goran Horvat, Damir Šoštarić, Zoran Balkić,

Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks

With the advancement of micro-electronic technology and the overall rising trend in the use of low cost microcontroller the need to share information over the existing infrastructure is more and more emphasized. The problem that persists is how to implement Ethernet communication in low cost microcontrollers while retaining the low cost of the device. This paper proposes the use of Microchip’s Stand-Alone Ethernet Controller ENC28J60 in order to establish Ethernet communication towards the application located on a Host PC. In order to reduce the induced overhead on the existing microcontroller firmware size, the paper proposes the use of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) alongside with added authentication in a form of Basic Access Authentication using Base64 algorithm, to establish communication. The communication is tested using Atmel AVR microcontroller architecture (Atmel AVR XMEGA) and Stand-Alone Ethernet Controller whereas the sent data is displayed on a National Instruments LabVIEW application running on a Host PC. Measurement is carried out using network protocol analysis and the comparison is made against existing communication protocol (TFTP). The proposed communication compared to the existing protocols such as Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) results in higher data rate and lower flash size for implementation, representing an advantage over the existing protocols.