Fuzzy fairness controller for NVMe SSDs

Modern NVMe SSDs are widely deployed in diverse domains due to characteristics like high performance, robustness, and energy efficiency. It has been observed that the impact of interference among the concurrently running workloads on their overall response time differs significantly in these devices, which leads to unfairness. Workload intensity is a dominant factor influencing the interference. Prior works use a threshold value to characterize a workload as high-intensity or low-intensity; this type of characterization has drawbacks due to lack of information about the degree of low- or high-intensity. A data cache in an SSD controller - usually based on DRAMs - plays a crucial role in improving device throughput and lifetime. However, the degree of parallelism is limited at this level compared to the SSD back-end consisting of several channels, chips, and planes. Therefore, the impact of interference can be more pronounced at the data cache level. No prior work has addressed the fairness issue at the data cache level to the best of our knowledge. In this work, we address this issue by proposing a fuzzy logic-based fairness control mechanism. A fuzzy fairness controller characterizes the degree of flow intensity (i.e., the rate at which requests are generated) of a workload and assigns priorities to the workloads. We implement the proposed mechanism in the MQSim framework and observe that our technique improves the fairness, weighted speedup, and harmonic speedup of SSD by 29.84%, 11.24%, and 24.90% on average over state of the art, respectively. The peak gains in fairness, weighted speedup, and harmonic speedup are 2.02x, 29.44%, and 56.30%, respectively.