A Gateway Virtual Network Function for InfiniBand and Ethernet Networks

The InfiniBand Architecture is an industry standard interconnect technology developed by the InfiniBand Trade Association in 1999 that provides higher reliability, higher availability, better performance, higher scalability than can be achieved using traditional interconnect technologies like the Ethernet. Due to its extremely lower latencies, InfiniBand is used to connect computer nodes in datacenters whereas Ethernet is used for management, storage area networks (SANs), etc. Therefore, it is imperative to have a mechanism to translate the InfiniBand frames to the Ethernet frames to make the two types of networks seamlessly communicate with each other. This paper introduces a gateway model which can be implemented as a virtual network function that translates Ethernet and InfiniBand frames using IPoIB protocol. Experimental results show that performance of the proposed solution is at par with that of Ethernet. Ethernet is considered for performance benchmark comparison since in the testing environment it had lesser bandwidth as compared to InfiniBand.