Design of RapidIO User-Level Communication Interface Based on Socket in Real-Time Applications

Interconnect fabric technology such as RapidIO, InfiniBand and PCIe has evolved to 10Gbps. However, user applications still can´t fully benefit from such high speed technology due to user-level protocols´ high processing overhead and redundant data copies. It remains difficult to design and implement flexible and efficient communication software, especially in real-time applications. This paper introduces a high performance RapidIO user-level communication interface, called RULCI. RULCI provides standard socket API to end users, as well as supports user defined interfaces. According to the communication characteristic and transfer data size per message, it realizes two modes of communication. One is based on remote direct memory access, and the other is based on message passing. RULCI is especially suitable for real-time system due to its easy using, message oriented, short transfer delays and large size message support. The experimental results show that RULCI can develop the promising communication performance of RapidIO for end users.