Benchmarking Terminology for AI Network Fabrics

This document defines benchmarking terminology for evaluating Ethernet-based network fabrics used in distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI) training and inference workloads. It provides a unified vocabulary consolidating and extending terms from RFC 1242, RFC 8238, and the companion AI fabric methodology documents, establishing precise, vendor-neutral definitions for collective communication primitives, RDMA transport mechanisms (RoCEv2 and Ultra Ethernet Transport), congestion control behaviors, AI-specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and fabric topology concepts. This document is a companion to [I-D.calabria-bmwg-ai-fabric-training-bench] and [I-D.calabria-bmwg-ai-fabric-inference-bench]. Those documents SHOULD NOT be applied without first consulting the terminology defined herein. Where definitions herein overlap with RFC 1242 or RFC 8238, the AI fabric context definition in this document takes precedence.