Experimental Results of Routing Protocol Convergence in a HAIPE Protected Fault Tolerant Network

Defense networks, such as the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS), often comprise major equipment facilities that are dispersed throughout the world and which are dependent on high-capacity network transport services for their own internal communication infrastructure. (The MUOS is a joint program to replace the current DoD UHF Satcom system with a modern, worldwide mobile communication system to meet the operational needs of today´s warfighter.) MUOS facilities are based largely on commercial networking and 3G wireless equipment, and use the DISN Core (formerly called GIG-BE) for their internal infrastructure communication network. In particular, the four globally distributed MUOS Radio Access Facilities (RAF), Switching Facilities (SF), and system management facilities have a major need for infrastructure communications among themselves. In order to protect this traffic, High Assurance Internet Protocol Encryptor (HAIPE) devices are deployed within the MUOS to protect the information that exists within and transits within MUOS´ internal network. This work is a preliminary empirical study of the automated failover-recovery (convergence) performance of an abstract network similar to MUOS´ envisioned HAIPE fault tolerant network using as a focal point the RAF´s internal network interface. Since the network´s convergence is derived from the use of and manipulation of routing protocol hold timers, the performance of two dominant network protocols (OSPF and BGP-4) is compared. Analysis of the experimental results reveals that variation of the protocols´ hold timers yields a negligible impact to performance and the availability offered by the two protocols is approximately the same.