Efficient High Hamming Distance CRCs for Embedded Networks

Cyclic redundancy codes (CRCs) are widely used in network transmission and data storage applications because they provide better error detection than lighter weight checksum techniques. 24- and 32-bit CRC computations are becoming necessary to provide sufficient error detection capability (Hamming distance) for critical embedded network applications. However, the computational cost of such CRCs can be too high for resource-constrained embedded systems, which are predominantly equipped with 8- bit microcontrollers that have limited computing power and small memory size. We evaluate the options for speeding up CRC computations on 8-bit processors, including comparing variants of table lookup approaches for memory cost and speed. We also evaluate classes of CRC generator polynomials which have the same computational cost as 24- or 16-bit CRCs, but provide 32-bit CRC levels of error detection, and recommend good polynomials within those classes for data word lengths typical of embedded networking applications.