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 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 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.