Traffic optimization in software defined naval network for satellite communications

Naval surface fleets of the United States and its allies rely on multiple satellite communication systems (SATCOM) for onboard communication with other entities such as ships, shore nodes and hosts from external networks. Current practice is for an onboard ship router to select a particular SATCOM link for each outgoing traffic flow based on a mission-specific routing policy. In this paper we propose an alternative solution by viewing the multi-SATCOM link utilization task as a traffic engineering and load balancing problem — in particular, as a Multi-Commodity Flow (MCF) optimization problem. We propose using the Flow Deviation Method (FDM) as a network-wide optimal load-balancing solution that maximizes total throughput and minimizes traffic flow delay and jitter. Our approach is equally valid for both UDP and TCP flows. Network-wide global optimization is carried out via a central controller in a Software Defined Networking (SDN) framework. For TCP flows we propose a novel solution that combines the best attributes of Multi-Path TCP, SDN and FDM. Compared to single-path TCP or MPTCP-SDN without FDM-based traffic optimizer, our proposed combined scheme is more efficient in bandwidth utilization, delay/jitter minimization and also robust against jamming and intermittent link failure. Network performance results are validated via Mininet emulation tests.