Design And Implementation Of Cross-Layer Flow Control Mechanism For FCIP

As the development of computer network technology and the growth of Internet industries, the amount of data in network is increasing rapidly. Data reliability and security become more and more important. SAN based on fibre channel technology provides data access for storage application with great performance. Various storage extension methods bring the storage area network technology into the mainstream data communication domain, it provides storage resolvent which is more neatly, easier to operate and manage.Storage extension makes the extension of SAN, at the same time it brings new problem, the difference of link speed between Fibre Channel and extension network. In order to deal with the problem, a cross layer FCIP flow control mechanism is presented. Transmit the sliding window information of TCP to the flow control mechanism of FC using cross-layer design method. According to the status of TCP transmission between extension gateways, adapt the transfer speed of fibre channel and the sending frequency of credit update signal dynamically. So that the transfer and receive speed between fibre channel and extension network match each other, with decreased network congestion, increased resource utilization and storage extension performance.Analysis of performance of cross layer FCIP flow control mechanism was made by simulations in OPNET Modeler. The results showed that: cross layer FCIP flow control mechanism could effectively control the data transmission between fibre channel and extension network with decreased congestion and increased resource utilization. It could reduce the FC data transfer speed when FC transfer speed was faster than TCP transfer speed, though caching the FC data and sending less credit update signals. Also, it could increase the FC speed when FC speed was slower than TCP speed, though sending more credit update signals.