IrNET for Linux-IrDA 1.0.0

IrNET is a protocol allowing to carry TCP/IP traffic between two IrDA peers in an efficient fashion. It is a thin layer, passing PPP packets to IrTTP and vice versa. It uses PPP in synchronous mode, because IrTTP offer a reliable sequenced packet service (as opposed to a byte stream). In fact, you could see IrNET as carrying TCP/IP in a IrDA socket, using PPP to provide the glue.

The main difference with traditional PPP over IrCOMM is that we avoid the framing and serial emulation which are a performance bottleneck. It also allows multipoint communications in a sensible fashion.We can automatically handle incomming connections through irnetd.


The main difference with IrLAN is that we use PPP for the link management, which is more standard, interoperable and flexible than the IrLAN protocol. For example, PPP adds authentication, encryption, compression, header compression and automated routing setup. And, as IrNET let PPP do the hard work, the implementation is much simpler than IrLAN.

IrNET was first introduced by Microsoft in the IrDA stack of Windows 2000, and they decided to remove both IrCOMM and IrLAN in favor of IrNET in their new IrDA stack. IrNET is a great idea (removing IrLAN and IrCOMM, on the other hand...), however IrNET is not an IrDA specification (at least, not yet, but there are rumors of something called IrDial...).

IrNET has been included in Linux kernel 2.4.0-test11, so all subsequent version of the kernel should support it out of the box (provided everything is set up properly). The latest version is in Linux kernel 2.4.15.