Profiling Bluetooth and Linux on the Xilinx Virtex II Pro

In this paper, we present profiling results of the Bluetooth standard implemented on the Xilinx Virtex II Pro device. The investigation is performed in two stages. First, we solely focus on the Bluetooth standard and its internal functions. Second, we focus on the Bluetooth standard in conjunction with an operating system. In both stages, we determine the most time-consuming functions by pinpointing the most computationally intensive or most data-intensive functions. The results of the first stage show that there are eight most time-consuming functions within Bluetooth. The results of the second stage show that (excluding interrupt related functions) the most time-consuming function is memcpy. This function is called inside of the Bluetooth standard in order to move received packets to another memory location (allowing new packets to be copied to the same memory location) and to reassemble a frame with all the received packets. memcpy is also called within other standard Linux networking protocols which should similarly benefit from an hardware implementation of this function.