To integrate a network stack, the system must generally provide a few commodities, such as timekeeping and heap-memory management. All the system features required by the stack are associated at compile time using a system-specific configuration header, which associates functions and global values accordingly.
Depending on the characteristics of the physical channels and the throughput to achieve, a TCP/IP stack may become very demanding in terms of heap memory used, allocating space for new incoming buffers until the upper layers are able to process them. Assigning separate memory pools to TCP/IP stack operations might help in some designs to keep the memory usage of the stack under control by placing thresholds ...
