DWL

Bristol

Research

Obviously, the AV/Firewall software is executed on the same general purpose processor that executes the operating system.

One way of increasing throughput would be be to encapsulate the 'Dataflow Dominated' tasks of the firewall such as deep packet inspection within an integrated circuit, and so offload those tasks to dedicated, fast, power efficient hardware rather than slow down the general purpose processor.

In this way, security would be a hardware feature integral to the modem (like modulation and coding are), rather than a bolt-on to detect problems once they are hiding in the operating system.