Flash Operation Group Scheduling for Supporting QoS of SSD I/O Request Streams

As SSDs are increasingly being used as high-performance storage or caches, attention is increasingly paid to the provision of SSDs with Quality-of-Service for I/O request streams of various applications in server systems. Since most SSDs are using the AHCI controller interface on a SATA bus, it is not possible to provide a differentiated service by distinguishing each I/O stream from others within the SSD. However, since a new SSD interface, the NVME controller interface on a PCI Express bus, has been proposed, it is now possible to recognize each I/O stream and schedule I/O requests within the SSD for differentiated services. This paper proposes Flash Operation Group Scheduling within NVME-based flash storage devices, and demonstrates through QEMU-based simulation that we can achieve a proportional bandwidth share for each I/O stream.