A Strategy to Manage Time Sensitive Traffic in InfiniBand

The InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) is becoming an industry standard both for communication between processing nodes and I/O devices and for interprocessor communication. It replaces the traditional I/O bus with a switchbased interconnect for connecting processing nodes and I/O devices. It is being developed by the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) to provide the levels of reliability, availability, performance, scalability, and quality of service (QoS) necessary for present and future server systems. For this, IBA provides a series of mechanisms that are able to guarantee QoS to the applications. In [1, 2], we proposed a strategy to compute the InfiniBand arbitration tables. We only evaluated our proposal for traffic with bandwidth requirements. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a strategy to compute the InfiniBand arbitration tables for traffic with bandwidth and delay requirements, which is a more complex task. Performance results show that, with a correct treatment of each traffic class in the arbitration of the output port, both traffic classes (with just bandwidth requirements and with bandwidth and delay requirements) meet their QoS requirements.