Evaluation of OpenFlow Load Balancing for Navy Raheleh Dilmaghani, Dae Kwon SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific San Diego, CA raheleh.dilmaghani, dae.kwon@navy.mil ABSTRACT Load balancing is critical in complex naval networks to pro- vide reliable performance by ensuring the system is not over- loaded and by high resource utilization. Load balancing guarantees the stability of a naval ship tactical network in a distributed environment. Tactical networks are highly dynamic due to mission requirements, policies, or environ- ment condition. There is never enough bandwidth for data- intensive military operations. Additional challenges of tac- tical environments are limited bandwidth, and intermittent connectivity caused by battle space condition. In this paper, we present our approach to create a benchmark to evaluate load balancing with OpenFlow protocol of SDN technology for a Navy scenario. Our results show that SDN technology offers agility and flexibility to configure, and manage the network. Keywords Software-Defined networking, OpenFlow, Load balancing 1. INTRODUCTION Open Flow is the Open Networking Foundation’s (ONF) standard on control protocol of Software-Defined Network- ing (SDN) [1]. SDN makes network programmable by separating the data and the control plane where the data plane is responsible in forwarding the traffic, and the control plane determines where the data should be forwarded to. SDN relies on switches that can be programmed through an SDN controller using a control protocol. The idea of open, programmable networks that enable agility and flexibility, has certainly resonated with navy, and throughout DoD. Programmable networks seem to mitigate challenges facing the network in providing state-of-art infrastructure to keep pace with ex- panding application demands and to keep cost, complexity, and labor needs under control. OpenFlow is the software package that takes forwarding de- cisions based on rules defined by network administrator. A new packet of a flow is forwarded to the controller by the switch to find out where it should be routed to. Commands are translated into low-level instructions for data plane and appears as a flow entry and the rest of flow follows the en- try in forwarding table. This work presents our approach to create a benchmark for experimentation and the results on evaluating load balancing capabilities of OpenFlow protocol in a navy environment. Organization of the rest of the paper is as following: Section 2 presents a summary of related work on OpenFlow and software defined networking. Section 3 presents character- istics and requirements of tactical environments. Section 4 describes the scenario and experimentation configuration. Section 5 presents results of load balancing in our navy scenario followed by a summary in Section 6. 2. RELATED WORK In [2], the authors present the results of their survey on im- plementation, testing and applications of SDN. They present two different SDN architecture including ForCES [3] and OpenFlow describing their differences in terms of design, ar- chitecture, forwarding model, and protocol interface. In [4], the differences of the two architecture are presented for en- terprise networks, data center, optical networks, home and small business, infrastructure-based wireless access network such as cellular and Wi-Fi where the last one mostly focuses on approaches and recommendation on provided vision for subsequent work. In [5], authors present their results from studying OpenFlow with different tools and its load bal- ancing capabilities. In [6], the author suggest separating intelligence from data path and its potential benefits com- pared to traditional networks with built-in functions within the infrastructure. In [7], the authors address challenges of network perfor- mance, scalability, security, and interoperability concerning wide use of cloud services and virtualization of data centers in order to take advantage of the predictability, continuity, and quality of service delivered by virtualization technolo- gies. In [8], the authors present use cases for Defense com- munity. In [9] and [10], the authors present a comprehen- sive survey on SDN and design issues. In [11], the author presents approaches and use cases of SDN. In [12], the au- thors present a use-case specific analysis to evaluate network management functionality of SDN. Milcom 2015 Track 2 - Networking Protocols and Performance U.S. Government work not protected by U.S. copyright 133