Cooperative Simulation of RDMA-based Network and Storage

Nowadays, the NVMe SSDs and the NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabric) protocols are popular, and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) has become one of the de-facto network fabric. Meanwhile, as the network bandwidth rapidly expands, potential bottlenecks can occur in both the RDMA-based network and the SSDs of the host. Accordingly, traffic management has become a hot research topic. However, the RDMA-based network and SSDs cannot be simulated at the same time, although simulators play an important role in research. To address this issue, we developed RSNet, a simulator for both the RDMA-based network and storage. Specifically, RSNet implements the RDMA and NVMe-oF protocols and integrates the open-source SSD simulator MQSim into the NS3 platform. The results validate that RSNet can simultaneously treat both network and SSD, as well as realistically simulate the collaboration between network and SSD. Moreover, RSNet is also capable of replicating certain issues within RDMA-based networks and storage. In total, we believe that RSNet would facilitate further research on traffic management in RDMA-based networks and storage.