A modern TCP/IP stack is perhaps the most fundamental part of a distributed embedded system. The reliability of the communications depends on how accurately the standard protocols are implemented, and the security of the services running on the device may be compromised by defects hidden in the TCP/IP stack implementation, its interface drivers, and the glue code to provide socket abstractions.
The most popular open source TCP/IP library for embedded devices is the lightweight IP stack, best known as lwIP. Integrated with many real-time OSes and even distributed in a bundle by hardware manufacturers, lwIP provides the IPv4 and IPv6 network, UDP and TCP socket communication, DNS and DHCP client, and a rich bundle of ...
