A Multipath TCP Solution for Software-Defined Military Heterogeneous Network

Naval Battlefield Network communications rely on various wireless network technologies for data delivery between different entities such as ships and shore nodes. A critical problem in current military wireless networks is that a loss of network connectivity due to wireless link outage or entity mobility takes relatively long time to recover. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution by applying Multi-path TCP and SoftwareDefined Networking on military wireless network to maximize the total throughput and minimize the traffic delay and jitter for the communication between ships and shore nodes. According to the Mininet-WiFi emulation experiment results, compared to current single-path TCP communication, our proposed approach provides almost no-cost network handover, more reliable network connectivity and higher end-to-end throughput. In addition, our designed SDN centralized controller is able to balance the traffic flows dynamically to effectively eliminate link congestion and achieve higher bandwidth utilization.