An easy-to-implement configuration for real-time communication over the standard Ethernet and TCP/IP technologies is presented.We introduce a dedicated network processing unit that handles all of the UDP/IP and Ethernet processing, which can communicate with a host computer through a shared memory, and use off-the-shelf Gigabit Ethernet switches. Experimental results show that the end-to-end delay through three Ethernet switches is below 180μs with 20-μs jitters.