Evaluation of OpenFlow Load Balancing for Navy

Load balancing is critical in complex naval networks to provide reliable performance by ensuring the system is not overloaded 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 environment condition. There is never enough bandwidth for data intensive military operations. Additional challenges of tactical 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.