FCIP Tunnel Load Sharing via Distinct TCP Sessions
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Solution Overview
Problem
In Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) implementations, different priority levels of data streams lose their distinct priorities during IP network congestion, and FCIP tunnels are vulnerable to heavy loading and failure due to single IP address pairing.
Innovation Solution
Establishing distinct TCP sessions within a single FCIP tunnel, each with its own TCP stack and settings for VLAN Tagging, quality of service, and Differentiated Services Code Point, to preserve priority distinctions and enable failover and load balancing.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Device complexity
If all FCIP traffic is passed through a single TCP session, then the implementation is simple, but all levels of service are similarly affected during IP network congestion and distinct priorities are lost
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides the single TCP session into multiple separate TCP sessions, each dedicated to a specific priority level (high, medium, low). This segmentation allows independent quality of service management for each priority level, preventing lower priority traffic from affecting high priority traffic during network congestion, thereby resolving the contradiction between implementation simplicity and priority distinction reliability.
2Device complexity
If an FCIP tunnel uses a single IP address pair, then the configuration is simple, but connections become heavily loaded and capacity requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the single IP address pair into multiple IP address pairs, each associated with a different TCP session and priority level. This allows traffic to be distributed across multiple IP connections, reducing the load on any single connection and increasing overall capacity without requiring complex configuration changes to the FCIP tunnel structure itself.
3Device complexity
If an FCIP tunnel uses a single IP address pair, then the configuration is simple, but failure can readily occur due to line problems
Solution Approach 1:
The patent assigns different quality characteristics to different TCP sessions through distinct IP address pairs, allowing each priority level to have independent failure domains. When a line problem occurs, only the affected IP pair and its associated priority traffic are impacted, while other priority levels continue to operate, thereby improving overall connection reliability without significantly increasing configuration complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
An IP gateway device establishes distinct TCP sessions within a single FCIP tunnel, each TCP session being designated for a different priority of service (e.g., high, medium, low), plus a control stream. Each TCP session has its own TCP stack and its own settings for VLAN Tagging (IEEE 802.1Q), quality of service (IEEE 802.1P) and Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP). By distributing data streams assigned to different priorities of service into different TCP sessions within the FCIP tunnel, an IP gateway device can preserve the distinctions between the data stream priorities while the data traffic is within the IP network. By further distributing the data streams between different circuits and trunks by use of multiple circuits, failover and load balancing can occur within the FCIP tunnels.