US Patent 7562158 Message context based TCP transmission

A method and system for transmitting packets. Packets may be transmitted when a protocol control block is copied from a host processing system to a network protocol offload engine. Message information that contains packet payload addresses may be provided to the network protocol offload engine to generate a plurality of message contexts in the offload engine. With the message contexts, protocol processing may be performed at the offload engine while leaving the packet payload in the host memory. Thus, packet payloads may be transmitted directly from the host memory to a network communication link during transmission of the packets by the offload engine. Other embodiments are also described.